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Then the music changed.

Benny was right. You feel it in your bones.

* * *

I want to be precise about the walk, because everybody asks about the walk, and the honest answer is that it was fine. Beautiful, in fact. The light came down through the redwoods in those bars of gold. Somebody's baby made a noise. My father's arm shook under my hand the whole way and neither of us mentioned it.

Lance was already at the front. Steven stood under the arch — eucalyptus and white ranunculus, which I had told Benny I had no feelings about — in a suit the color of oyster shell, looking so happy that two people in the front row were already crying.

I picked a face at the far end, the way I'd been told, and walked toward it. The face I picked belonged to a man from Ascendant's finance team whose name I did not remember. That was deliberate. I want it on the record. I had a clear view of my ex-husband in a navy suit on an aisle seat in the middle of the meadow, and I chose a stranger from an accounting department. He was so uncomfortable being looked at that he stared at the grass the entire way.

My father put my hand in Steven's and sat down.

That is when the trouble started. It wasn't Gregory. It wasn't Zephyr. It was not anything anybody could have planned for.

It was the officiant.

Her name was Reverend Anne-Marie and my mother had chosen her. She was a lovely woman, and she’d sent us all a document about intention that very nearly brought tears to my eyes.

She welcomed everybody and said something warm about the trees. She got a genuine laugh with a line about what the gravel driveway had done to her car.

Then she said: "I'd like to begin by asking Blaine and Steven to look at each other for a moment before we start. Really look. Don't say anything. It's an old practice, it doesn't take long, and it is the best part of any wedding I do."

And the whole meadow went quiet and settled in, delighted, because it is a lovely thing to be asked to do.

Steven turned to me, took both my hands, and looked into my eyes.

And I looked back.

I'm going to try to describe this accurately, and I'm aware that I'm going to fail.

God, he looked happy. That's the thing. Steven Ellis Bland stood in front of his entire company being radiantly, uncomplicatedly happy, looking at me the way you look at somebody you are about to be married to. And I looked at him and had one thought.

I don't know a single thing about you.

Not what you're afraid of. Not what your mother did or didn't do to you. Not what you think about when you can't sleep, or whether you have ever once in your life sat up at two in the morning with the whole weight of it on your chest.

I had never asked. In all that time. Not once.

I know your revenue targets and the order of your eleven-step Korean skin care routine. I know you like a room warm, you cry at commercials, you ran hurdles in high school and something happened to your knee.

I have never asked you one question I didn't already know the answer to.

Because I didn't want to know. That was the arrangement. I chose a man I could not be hurt by and then I made absolutely certain I never learned enough about him to be hurt. And I’d spent a year congratulating myself on how sensible I was being.

"Lovely," said Reverend Anne-Marie, gently.

And I could not let go of Steven's hands.

He noticed first. That is what I want understood. Steven noticed before anybody else in that meadow. His face changed — slightly, around the eyes — and he said, very quietly, so that nobody past the front row could hear him:

"Babe?"

"I'm fine."

"You're squeezing kind of hard."

"I'm fine."