We did not have my father’s grand rented organ.

We did not have the country-club reception he had planned to impress his board.

What we had instead was thirty of the bravest people in the country standing witness around us — and my mother, who came back into the chapel ten minutes later, having signed her statement, and took a seat beside my brother with her head held high.

And I want to say that the decision to keep going — to turn to that stunned priest and ask him to finish what he’d started — was the truest thing I did all day, truer even than the walk.

Because there was a version of that afternoon where I let my father win one last time, where I let the catastrophe he’d authored define the day, where I crumpled at the altar and let his arrest be the thing my wedding was about. I felt the pull of it.

It would have been the natural thing, to dissolve.