Chapter 14 — Husband and Wife

And when the priest said, at last, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” Ezekiel pulled me into his arms and kissed me, and the whole strange, shattering, extraordinary day fell away and it was only the two of us.

I have been to weddings since with white doves and string quartets and flowers flown in from other countries, the kind of weddings my father would have called proper.

None of them held a candle to mine.

Because a wedding is supposed to be a room full of the people who actually love you, witnessing a true thing, and by that measure I had the richest wedding I have ever seen — thirty people who had traveled across the country to honor the man I was marrying, a mother who had risked everything to make sure the day happened, a brother weeping with the first free breath of his adult life, and a groom who had proven, an hour before our vows, that he would do the right and costly thing even when it terrified him.

My father had wanted to give me a wedding that impressed his board.