Part One: The Car Door

The wedding was at a courtyard property on Cordova Street in Saint Augustine, the kind with a coquina wall and a live oak in the middle of it and a fee schedule that starts at nine thousand dollars, and I was in the third row on the bride’s side because Dolores Vanterpool does not drive on the interstate anymore and I had said yes in a group chat in February without thinking about it.

That is the entire reason I was there.

I want that on the record early, because people have since constructed a version of this in which I went looking for something, and I did not go looking for anything.

I went because a woman I had sat beside in eleventh-grade chemistry asked me for a ride and because I had a Saturday free.

I had muted the class group chat in 2019.

I had seen the engagement announcement the way you see things in a muted chat — as a rectangle you scroll past at a traffic light.

Giselle Marchetti, who I had known for four years and not spoken to for seventeen, was getting married.

I had tapped the heart.

I had not opened the photographs.

That is the first of the things I have had to sit with.

The ceremony was called for four o’clock.

At about ten past, somebody at the back made the sound that a crowd makes when a car turns in, and everybody did the thing everybody does, which is turn around while pretending not to.

A grey sedan came through the gate.

A driver got out and went round.

And I would like to be able to tell you that I recognized my husband.

I did not recognize my husband.

I recognized a watch.