The ceremony was at two, my mother walked herself, she'd been clear about that from the moment Imogen suggested Dorian might walk her in, she was trying to say that she wasn't being given away, she was arriving on her own terms, and she walked down the centre of the Ardmore's ballroom with her head up and Imogen and me flanking her two steps behind, and I heard the room respond to it, the quality of attention shifting from polite to genuine.
Dorian was waiting at the front, he watched her come. She reached out to him and he took her hands.
"Still here," he said, quietly, just to her.
"Still here," she agreed.
Something happened during the vows, the thing Andrei had been planning, it arrived not as an announcement, or as a produced document, it arrived as a name.
Spoken from the back o
