I thought, at the time, that it was the loneliest moment of my life.

I understand now that it was the exact opposite.

I was never walking alone.

There were thirty people about to come through the doors for the man waiting at the end of that aisle, and a mother in the back row who had spent a decade making sure, in secret, that I would land softly, and a groom who had already, unseen, thrown a line around my whole life.

My father looked at that man and saw nothing, and told a chapel full of people so.

But he was wrong, the way he had been wrong about everything that ever mattered.