The second wedding was in June, in a garden in Bellhaven, and it was not mine.
Nora got married.
She had met a woman named Claire at a conference in Seattle two years earlier, and they had been together ever since, and they had decided to get married in a small ceremony with forty guests, in the garden of a house Claire's parents owned, under a tree that was older than the state.
I was the maid of honor. I wore a dress Nora picked out, a soft blue, and I stood beside her under the tree, and I held her bouquet while she said her vows.
It was a good wedding. It was a small wedding, and a real one, and nobody in the audience was making a calculation. Claire's parents cried. Nora's mother cried. I did not cry, but only because I had decided not to, and I spent the whole ceremony looking at
