“You built this whole thing on a lie.

This wedding is over.”

There was a terrible dignity in the way she did it.

She did not scream at him or throw the photograph in his face or make a scene worthy of the scene he had made of his life.

She simply took off the veil — the whole expensive symbol of the day, of the future she had believed in that morning — and set it down, and named the truth, and was finished.

I watched a woman decide, in the space of a minute, that she would rather walk out of her own wedding with nothing than stay in it with a lie, and I thought: there is more courage in that quiet gesture than in anything her groom had done in his whole polished life.