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"You have been keeping score since the day we met and you never once told me the rules."

Steven was right. He was completely, entirely, unanswerably right, and I did not have one single thing to say.

"I'm sorry," I breathed.

"Yeah," said Steven.

Then he took off his ring, looked at it, and — because he is who he is, and I will never be able to explain to anybody what it was like to watch this — he handed it to Lance, because Lance was the nearest person and he didn't want to drop it in the grass.

Then he ran out of that meadow, up the aisle, past every person there, alone.

I stayed where I was. I don't know why. There was nowhere obvious to go and my legs had stopped taking instruction. I stood under an arch of eucalyptus and white ranunculus and let everyone stare at me.

My mother was on her feet and father had both hands on the back of the chair in front of him. Benny came up that aisle at a walk — not a run, a walk, because everybody was watching and a run would have made it worse — and stood beside me and put a hand flat on my back.

"Right," he said quietly. "I've got you. Do you want them gone?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll clear the meadow and you won't have to speak to anybody." He squeezed my shoulder once. "Look at me. Nobody here has ever seen anything like this and they are all going to talk about it forever, and none of that is happening right now. Right now you're going to walk up that hill with your father, and I'll do the rest."

"Benny."

"Yes."

"This is my fault. All of it."

"You've cancelled a wedding," said Benny Longworth. "I've seen a few. This is the first one anybody's been honest at."

Then he turned around, raised his voice in the pleasant register of a man who has done this professionally for years, and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all so much for coming. There will be no ceremony this afternoon. Please make your way up to the house, where there is a very large amount of food."

And all those well-dressed people got up and filed out of that meadow while I stood there feeling numb.

My father placed his arm over my shoulders and we began to walk.. We got about halfway up the path before I stopped, because I had seen him.

Gregory was standing where the chairs ended, in a navy suit, with his hands at his sides.

He didn't come toward me.

That's the part I keep going back to. He did not come toward me and he did not say a single word. Gregory Normand has never in his life not done a thing.

We gazed at each other.

"Sol," said my father. "Come on, son."

And I let him walk me up the hill.

Chapter Twenty

Gregory

Here's what a wedding looks like when there isn't one.

The chairs stay. Nobody thinks about the chairs. Two rows of them are still crooked from people getting up fast, there's a program on nearly every seat, and the arch stands at the front with its eucalyptus and its white flowers, waiting.

The string trio stopped mid-piece. That's the part I noticed. They got partway into something, stopped, put the instruments in their cases, and one of them asked a passing waiter whether they still got paid.

Benny's caterers went up the hill at a trot to feed and water the stunned guests. I stood at the back of the meadow until the last of them had gone.