Chapter Two: The Banquet Hall
The ceremony lasted twenty-three minutes, which was exactly what they had planned, because Marcus had sat down with the officiant six weeks ago and talked through the timing with the patient specificity of a man who understood that loving someone and planning a logistics operation were not, on the day of a wedding, entirely separate activities. Sophie had found this both mildly absurd and deeply characteristic and had loved him for it.
The vows were their own. They had written them separately and not shared them in advance, and the result was that each of them cried a little while hearing the other’s, and several guests cried a great deal, including Marcus’s father, who was a retired civil engineer and had warned everyone beforehand that he would hold it together and had not.
The petals were white. Someone had organized this — Sophie wasn’t sure who, suspected Marcus’s sister — and they came down at exactly the right moment, which was when the officiant said you may kiss your bride, and the timing was so precise that several guests later asked if they’d rehearsed it, which they hadn’t.
Then dinner.
The banquet hall was inside the restaurant proper — warm wood and old stone, the lights lower than on the terrace, the round tables set with candles that Sophie had spent an afternoon choosing from a catalog. The band set up in the far corner. The food was good: the kind of rustic, generous country cooking that is harder to achieve than complicated food, where everything on the plate is simple and everything on the plate is exactly right.
Sophie moved from table to table in the way of brides who actually want to talk to their guests rather than be delivered to them. She had conversations about her grandmother’s lace and about Marcus’s speech at the pre-wedding dinner and about the oak trees and the lights and the small decisions that accumulate into a day. She ate, which not all brides manage. She laughed at her uncle’s toast, which was long and wandering and arrived at something genuinely moving in the last paragraph, the way his speeches always did.
Marcus, across the room, was deep in conversation with his oldest friend and former university roommate, a man named David who had driven eight hours to be here and had shown up with a wedding card containing a handwritten note that had made Marcus go quiet for a moment in a way that Sophie recognized as him being moved but not wanting to show it. She watched him laugh at something David said and thought: this is the day, the way you think it when it’s happening, when you’re still inside it and can feel its edges.
At the head table, someone refilled her glass.
“Are you ready for the first dance?” her maid of honor, Petra, asked beside her.
“I’ve been ready since the rehearsal,” Sophie said. “Marcus kept stepping on my feet in the rehearsal.”
“He knows,” Petra said. “He’s been thinking about it all through dinner. I can tell.”
“How can you tell?”
“He keeps looking at the floor.”
