Over the daughter of the man who had just called my groom a nobody.

The piano stopped.

The pianist lifted her hands from the keys, and the vast chapel fell into a silence so total I could hear the rain that had begun to tap, very lightly, against the high stained-glass windows.

And into that silence, a tall man in his late fifties, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and the bearing of someone who had spent his life being obeyed, stepped out of the rank and walked, unhurried, to a stop directly beside my father’s row.

Chapter 5 — Commander Hayes

“Sir,” the man said to my father, mildly.