“He’s going to walk me down that aisle. He just doesn’t know why it matters as much as it does.”
We got married on a Saturday in October, in a small chapel outside the city, wearing a sixty-year-old ivory silk dress altered with my own hands.
Rhys offered me his arm at the chapel doors, and I took it. Halfway down the aisle, he leaned close.
“I’m so proud of you, Shea.”
I thought to myself: You already are, Dad. You just don’t know the half of it.
Grandma Bess wasn’t in the room, but she was in the dress, and in the pearl buttons I had reattached one by one.
She was in the hidden pocket I had carefully restitched after folding her letter back inside. It had always belonged there.
Some secrets aren’t lies. They are just love with nowhere else to go. Grandma Bess was a woman who chose me, every single day, without being asked.
