Chapter 24: The Door Held Open

"Go," I said.

Simon's hand closed around mine, and I went down the steps.

The first was easy.

The second was easy.

On the third I felt the whole terrace watching my heel, and I put my weight on it anyway.

The stone held.

I stepped onto the fourth and then the grass, and Simon let out a long breath through his nose.

"You're laughing," I said.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"A little." He kept hold of my hand. "It held."

"I told you it would."

The two hundred chairs had turned to face us.

The quartet found its place again and began the processional, late and slightly wrong, and nobody minded.

I walked up the aisle I had walked a hundred times in my head.

The grass smelled of cut stems and sun.

My mother's cousin was crying quietly in the third row.

She reached out and touched my sleeve as I passed.

A few rows back there was an empty seat on the aisle with a white card on it.

I knew whose it had been meant for, and I did not look at it for long.

The officiant waited under the arch of blue delphiniums.

She wore a grey suit, with her glasses pushed up on her head.

"Do you two have your own words?" she asked.

"I do," Simon said.

"Go ahead."

He turned to me, and he did not take out a card.

"I held a door once, for a stranger," he said. "She caught the rail and went in.

"I've spent two lives wanting to know what happens to a person like that."

The lawn was quiet.

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