That was the whole thing.

She did not scream and she did not confess and nobody gasped, and she said one sentence in a reasonable voice, and every single person on that lawn understood exactly what had happened.

I took the ring out of my jacket pocket and set it on the little table beside the guest book.

Then I walked down the aisle the wrong way for the second time in two minutes, and my brigade commander — Colonel Adeyemi, in a suit, third row on the aisle — stood up as I came past him, and did not say a word, and put his hand on my shoulder for about a second, and sat back down.

I got to Hannah.

I picked her up, which I had not done in two years and which she was much too big for.