Her name is Dot.
Dorothy Ashby professionally, Dot to everyone, a woman of sixty with the energy of someone half that age and the specific authority of a person who has organised four hundred and twelve weddings and has seen every possible way a couple can make a simple thing complicated.
She sits across from us at our kitchen table on a Saturday morning with a notebook the size of a small country and looks at us both with the assessing gaze of a professional who is deciding what category of couple she is dealing with.
"Tell me what you want," she says.
"Something small," I reply. "Intimate. The people who matter."
"How many people?" she asks.
Rhys and I look at each other.
We have not discussed a number.
"Forty," I say.
"Sixty," he says simultaneously.
Dot
