And she chose, in that moment, to do it anyway.

That is the part I am proudest of, from before I understood there was anything to be brave about.

Because it would have been so easy, and so understandable, to turn around.

To let the humiliation win.

To decide that a wedding your own father sabotages at the altar is a wedding cursed from the start, and flee it, and spend the rest of your life telling the story as the day you were saved from a mistake.

Every pressure in that room was pushing me back toward the doors and the life my father had planned for me.