That was the justice my mother had kept the ground for.

It came.

And Lucas and I were married, in the end, some months later, quietly, in a small ceremony with no dealership money and no hospital-wing names attached to any of it — only the people who actually loved us, and, in the back rows, a good number of men and women in dress uniform who had become, over that impossible night, something like family.

My mother gave me away, walking me down a far humbler aisle than the first one, her arm steady under mine the whole way.

She had earned it a hundred times over, and this time, I did not have to walk alone.

I think often of that first walk, though — the one I took alone, chin up, down a chapel aisle while my own father called the best man I have ever known a nobody.