The Reading of the Will
Halfway Down the Aisle

1998

August 25, 2026 · Part 7 of 10 · 2 min

Somebody finally had the sense to usher the guests toward the reception tent, though half of them lingered at the edges pretending to check their phones. The wedding planner kept saying "if everyone could just—" to a crowd that had stopped listening to her the second Holt said the word letters.

My father sat down heavily on the front pew, and for the first time in my life, I watched my father look old.

"I met Celestine in the spring of '97," he said. "Before I met your mother. We worked together — a marketing firm downtown, gone now. It was six months. It ended badly, and by the time I found out she was pregnant, she'd already left the city. She wouldn't answer my calls. I told myself she'd changed her mind about telling me because she'd changed her mind about me."

"You never looked for her?" I heard myself ask, and hated how much it sounded like an accusation.

"I looked for two years. Then I met your mother, and I made a decision to stop looking, because I didn't think I had the right to blow up someone else's family for a maybe." He looked at Celestine, who was still sitting in the grass, Griffin now crouched beside her, one hand hovering like he didn't know if he was allowed to touch her anymore. "I told myself it was noble. It wasn't. It was easier."

Griffin's voice, when it came, was very quiet. "Mom. Is it true?"

Celestine's answer took so long I thought she might not give one at all.

"Yes," she finally said, barely above a whisper. "Emory is your biological father. I found out I was pregnant three weeks after I left, and I was twenty-three and terrified, and Holt asked me to marry him before you were even born, and I said yes because it was the only door that didn't feel like falling."

The garden had gone utterly still.

"I was going to tell you," she said, looking up at Griffin with her makeup ruined and her voice breaking apart. "I swear to you I was going to tell you. I just kept waiting for a day that felt survivable, and it never came, and then—" her eyes flicked to me, to my dress, to the ring already on my finger "—and then you fell in love with his daughter, and I thought if I said nothing, maybe none of this would ever have to be real."

Continue the story Part 8: What the Cameras Caught →

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