Pamela had come down the steps behind me.
She got to the front row and she said, not into any microphone, “Christopher, that is a completely one-sided account of a very complicated—”
“Did you tell her to stay in that room until it was over?”
The pause was about two seconds long and there were sixty-one people in it.
“I told her to give us the afternoon,” Pamela said.
And that was it.
That was the whole thing.
She did not scream and she did not confess and nobody gasped, and she said one sentence in a reasonable voice, and every single person on that lawn understood exactly what had happened.
I took the ring out of my jacket pocket and set it on the little table beside the guest book.
Then I walked down the aisle the wrong way for the second time in two minutes, and my brigade commander — Colonel Adeyemi, in a suit, third row on the aisle — stood up as I came past him, and did not say a word, and put his hand on my shoulder for about a second, and sat back down.
I got to Hannah.
I picked her up, which I had not done in two years and which she was much too big for.
She put her face in my neck and said, into my collar, so quietly that only I heard it:
“Is everyone mad at me?”
“No,” I said.
“Not one person.
Not one.”
Part Nine: The Corridor, Again
It took an hour to leave.
That is the part nobody puts in the story.
There is no cut to black.
There were sixty-one people and a catering company and a quartet and a cake, and somebody had to deal with all of it, and Samantha and Colonel Adeyemi’s wife dealt with most of it while I stood in a room and made three phone calls.
Pamela found me in the same service corridor, near the same door, which I don’t think she noticed and which I have never stopped noticing.
She had taken the veil off.
She was holding it.
“Are you happy?” she said.
“No.”
“You humiliated me in front of my entire family.”
“Yes.”
She had clearly expected an argument and I did not have one, and it made her angrier than anything I could have said.
