I heard it, and it stung, though I could not have told you exactly why, only that there was something in the phrasing, something transactional, that did not belong at a wedding.

You do not tell a young man he has chosen well when he has simply fallen in love.

You tell a man he has chosen well when he has made a shrewd decision, closed a good deal, selected the correct option from a set.

I filed the sting away with all the other small strange things, the smoothness, the calm, my parents’ bottomless composure, and I watched Gabriel slide a plain gold ring onto my sister’s finger, and I wondered, with a flicker of something I could not name, whether I actually knew the young man I had called my best friend for my entire life.

I did know him.