His Favorite Shirt novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Slideshow

On the twenty-eighth I walked onto the Pemberton Homes lawn in my own wedding dress.

Bea had pinned the waist that morning on the cottage floor, with her glasses sliding down her nose and four pins in her mouth.

"If this is a war crime," she said around them, "I want to be in the photograph."

It was a six-thousand-dollar dress and it fit.

The lawn ran down to the lake under white lights, with three hundred guests at round tables and a stage at the water's edge.

A screen the height of a house stood behind the stage.

The talking died as I came down the steps.

Women turned in their chairs, and a man in white loafers put down his glass.

I had my camera strapped cross-body over the lace, because that was how I always worked.

I walked the length of the aisle between the tables without hurrying.

Heath sat at the front table in the pale blue shirt.

I looked for the gray one and did not find it.

He had put on the shirt he wore to every day that mattered, and he stared at his plate as I went by.

Brielle sat beside him in a cream dress, with a white corsage on her wrist and her chin high.

She had made up her face to look calm.

Posy sat between them in her flower-girl dress, and she saw me and mouthed my name with her whole face.

I smiled at her and kept walking.

Nolan stood at the edge of the lawn with his mother, in a clean white shirt, and I felt him watching me the whole way.

Heath's father was already on the stage.

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