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My mother put both hands over her mouth and said, "Oh, my darling," and I looked at her face and understood something I hadn’t understood at any point that week.

She had stopped hoping I'd call it off.

She’d been hoping right through the champagne that morning, and somewhere between then and two o'clock she had decided to have a lovely afternoon with her son instead. I could see her doing it. My mother has never been subtle about anything.

"You look like water," she said. "I said it before and I meant it."

"You did."

"Your father is going to be useless."

"I know."

"He's been down in that meadow all afternoon moving chairs nobody asked him to move."

I laughed, and then had to stop laughing, because Ines said something sharp in Portuguese and pulled the shoulder straight.

* * *

The processional was at four, and Benny had us staged in the west sitting room well before it. Just us — me, Lance, my father, and Benny with the iPad. Steven was in the east wing with Bex and two of his attendants and, per Benny, having "a moment, but a good one."

"Right," Benny said. "Order. Steven's side goes down first, spaced out, I'll be counting them. Then Lance. Then you two."

"Understood."

"Blaine." He glanced up. "You're going to hear the music change. That's your cue, and you won't need me to give it to you. You'll feel it. Everybody does."

"Fine."

"And when you reach the top of the aisle, don't look at the crowd. Pick one face at the far end and walk toward it."

"Which face?"

"Anybody," said Benny. "That isn't the point of the exercise."

He held my eyes a second longer than he needed to.

"You've done everything right," he said. "I want that said out loud before we go down. Nobody could look at this week and tell you that you've done a single thing wrong."

A strange thing to say to a groom. I have thought about it a great deal since.

* * *

My father offered me his arm and I took it. We stood in a doorway looking down through the redwoods at the backs of all those heads.

"Sol."

"Please. Don't."

"It isn't that." He put his other hand over mine on his arm. "I only want to say that whatever happens down there, you are the best thing I have ever been in a room for."

"Dad—"

"That's all. That's the entire speech." He cleared his throat. "Also, your mother has informed me that if I cry audibly she'll divorce me after forty years. I'd appreciate it if you didn't say anything kind to me. Or unkind. Either would finish me."

"You've got dirt on your shoe."

"Thank you," said my father, with feeling. "That's perfect."