Page 38 of Until You

Someone wheels out a projector and a white screen. Rebecca points and directs. I stand off to the side, clutching my laptop like a life raft, trying to look calm and probably failing spectacularly.

“You okay, sweetheart?” Rebecca appears beside me, her hand warm on my arm.

“Fine. Great. Totally fine.” I’m vibrating. Literally vibrating. My hands are shaking against the laptop case.

She squeezes my arm. “It’s going to be wonderful. I peeked at a few of the photos when you sent me that preview, and I already needed tissues.”

“I probably should have included a tissue warning.”

She laughs—warm, genuine, the laugh of a woman who has raised five children and weathered a hundred family crises and still manages to make everyone around her feel like the most important person in the room. “Go on, now. Set it up. And then step back and let yourself enjoy it.”

I nod. Set up the laptop while she introduces me and the slideshow as a special gift to Mimz and Pops. My hands are still shaking, but the mechanics of the task settle me. Plug this in, click this button, adjust this setting. Concrete steps. One at a time. Manageable.

When I step back, I position myself at the edge of the crowd. In the shadows. Where I can see the screen and the faces of the people watching it, but where no one is looking at me.

This isn’t my moment. This is theirs.

The music starts.

I chose carefully. George Strait, because Mimz told me once that he was playing on the radio the night Pops proposed. The notes fill the warm air, threading through the string lights, settling over the crowd like a blanket.

Then the photos begin.

The wedding. Mimz in daisies. Pops in his too-big suit. That look between them—the one that made the photographer invisible.

A murmur moves through the crowd. Soft. Reverent.

The honeymoon. Her against the car. Him with the fish. Her asleep with her feet on the dash.

Quiet laughter now. Someone says, ” Oh, Tommy,“ in a voice thick with affection.

The first apartment. The ugly wallpaper. Mimz at the stove, looking over her shoulder with that expression of plain, devastating love.

And then the hospital.

Mimz in the bed, hair plastered to her forehead. Pops on the edge of the mattress. And between them—cradled in hands so careful they might as well be praying—a baby. Oliver’s father.

Their first child. Their first moment as a family. The moment where two became three and everything that followed—every Christmas and birthday and grandchild and anniversary, every single person at this party—was set in motion.

Then the song I couldn’t not include, Brad Paisley’s Two People Fell in Love.

As the song plays, a new sound moves through the crowd. Not laughter this time. Something lower. Something that catches in throats and presses against the backs of eyes. Something that comes with sniffs and passed tissues.

I hear James Blankenship make a sound I recognize—low and rough and male, the particular noise a man makes when he’s trying to hold himself together in public. Rebecca reaches for his hand.

The slideshow continues. Decades unfolding. I spent hours arranging these—organizing them by the years scrawled on the backs, building a visual narrative that tracks the growth of this family like rings in a tree. Each photo dissolves into the next. Christmases. Birthdays. Vacations I wasn’t part of. Grandchildren I’m only now putting faces to.

And there they are. The five of them. Oliver and Henry and Kelsie and Addison and Payton—gap-toothed and sunburned, tangled together on Mimz’s couch, perched on Pops’ tractor, asleep in a pile on the living room floor that I walk across every morning.

Oliver.

He’s maybe eight in one of the photos. Small and serious, even then. Sitting on a fence rail with his cowboy hat—a kid-sized one, battered even at that age—pulled low over his eyes. There’s a calf beside him. His hand rests on its neck. He’s not smiling, but there’s something in his expression that I recognize instantly: contentment. The deep, quiet kind that doesn’t need to announce itself.

No great-grandchildren yet, I can’t help but notice. Despite three of the Blankenship kids being married.

Again, my hand drops to my stomach. And that’s when the tears come.

I don’t fight them. There’s no point. They’re silent and steady, and I let them fall, standing in the shadows at the edge of a crowd that isn’t mine, watching fifty years of someone else’s love story unspool in light and color on a white screen.