“Anything, sweetheart.”
“No matter what Dad does at the wedding, don’t react.”
I laughed. “What exactly are you expecting him to do?”
There was a pause. Just a small one.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just want one day where everybody gets along.”
That pause should have told me something. The careful way she said nothing should have told me even more.
Instead, I promised.
And I thought I was giving her a gift.
Part Two: The Stone Church
The ceremony was beautiful.
Emma married a kind, gentle man named Michael in the little stone church where my own parents had been married fifty years earlier. Late-afternoon sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows and scattered patches of red and gold across the aisle as they said their vows.
Halfway through hers, Emma started to cry.
Michael reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb, so tenderly that she laughed right in the middle of a sentence. The whole church laughed with her.
For that one hour, everything felt easy.
No divorce. No old resentments. No one quietly keeping score of who was sitting where, or who had spoken to whom, or who had arrived late.
Just Emma. Radiant. Happy.
