Out loud, in that room, and it came out wrong.

I said, “He processed weddings for twenty-eight years and he was nervous about eleven minutes in a room he’d booked four thousand times?”

And Teresa said, “That’s exactly what I said to him.”

And then she told me what he answered, and she gave it to me carefully, because she had clearly been carrying it for five weeks and knew what it was.

She said that Walter Strand had looked at that wooden arch with the silk flowers on it — an arch he had personally scheduled, and dusted, and once had rewired the lights on — and had said: