Chapter 23: The Wedding She Chose

We were married on the Brandauer pier on a Saturday in October, with the water flat and bright behind us.

I chose the day, the place and the dress.

The dress was a plain cream one that Thea and I found in a shop on Fell Street.

Nobody had ever worn it before me.

Two hundred chairs stood along the planks, and for once I knew nearly everyone in them.

The Brandauer foremen sat in the front, in their good jackets.

The crane operators sat behind them.

The Kell men filled the left side, all eighteen, with their green rings polished.

The eldest stood at the end of the pier with his cane and a paper he had no need to read.

Thea walked ahead of me down the planks, in pale blue, with her sling gone and her shoulder stiff.

She turned at the end and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and the whole pier saw it.

Then my father came with me.

He had not walked in eight months.

He walked now on a cane and the day nurse's arm, a step at a time.

His gray head was up, and his eyes were on the man at the end of the pier.

"Papa," I said. "You don't have to."

"Yes," Anton said.

It took him the whole length of the pier.

At the end, he put my hand into Matthias's, and held them both there.

"Mine," my father said, to Matthias. "Careful."

"Yes, sir," Matthias said.

The eldest read the words, and we said them.

I had written mine on the back of the old seating chart, under the struck-out terms, and I did not need it.

"I was taken on a road to a wedding I never chose," I said. "This one I chose."

"You hurt me, and you told me the truth about it."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Saw the Ending Before My Wedding from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.