Down the Aisle

The string quartet started at exactly four o'clock, and two hundred people stood up in their seats like a single held breath.

I remember thinking: this is really happening, in the stupid, floating way brides are supposed to think it. My father's arm was looped through mine at the top of the aisle, and I could feel him trembling — not nerves, I realized. Something heavier than nerves.

"Dad, you okay?"

"Fine," he said. "Proud of you."

Ahead of us, the aisle ran white between rows of Griffin's family on one side and mine on the other, down to where Griffin stood at the altar in a charcoal suit, grinning like a man who'd already won something. Beside him, his brother Sawyer stood as best man. In the front row, Celestine sat rigid as a fence post, her husband Holt's hand over hers, her eyes fixed somewhere past my father's shoulder.

The quartet swelled. Someone cued us forward.

We stepped off together, my father and I, into two hundred watching faces, into flashbulbs and someone's baby crying softly near the back. I focused on Griffin's face, on not tripping in heels I'd only worn twice before, on breathing.

We were maybe ten steps in — halfway between the first row and the point of no return — when my father's arm went rigid under mine.

He stopped walking.

The quartet kept playing for two more bars before the cellist noticed and faltered into silence. I heard the murmur roll backward through the guests like wind through wheat.

"Dad?"

He turned to me, and for the first time all day, his eyes were completely clear — no performance in them at all, just fear, plain and enormous.

"Noelle," he said, low enough that only the front rows could hear him lean in, "before you take one more step, there's something you need to know about Griffin's family."

Behind him, I watched Celestine Hale rise halfway out of her seat.