## The Last Thing I’ll Say
Six months after a wedding, most of the acute drama of its planning has faded. The flowers have wilted, the food has been eaten, the photographs have been edited and posted and admired and archived. What remains is the marriage, and the set of relationships that the wedding reorganized or revealed.
Claire is married to Owen. They are good together in the way I always thought they would be good together. She calls me on Tuesdays now, sometimes, for no particular reason. That is new, and I hold it carefully, without pressing on it.
I went back to Willowmere once, about two months after the wedding. Not to the venue itself — to the town nearby, which turned out to have a small food scene and a used bookstore and the kind of afternoon that works well alone. I walked past the driveway entrance on my way from the parking area to the main street. The gate was closed. There was a sign for a different event.
I kept walking.
The twenty-four hundred dollar lesson is that good faith is not insurance. It is a stance you take toward people you love, and it reflects your values, and it does not protect you from the cost of circumstances changing around you. I made a commitment in good faith in September and it cost me in February and the twenty-four hundred dollars reflected that gap between what I had believed and what had actually happened.
I do not regret signing the contract. I regret that I didn’t put the conditions in writing, but I understand why I didn’t, and I understand that putting conditions in writing would have changed something about the gesture that I valued at the time. I am not sure I would do it differently even knowing what I know now, which may be sentimental or may be an accurate assessment of what relationships actually cost.