Her father offered his arm. She took it.
He didn't look at her. That was the thing. He hadn't looked at her since the morning in his study six months ago, not really. He'd looked in her direction. He'd spoken to a point over her left shoulder. But he hadn't met her eyes, and he didn't meet themnow. Noelle understood that her father had decided he couldn't afford to.
"You look lovely," he said, to the carpet.
"Thank you."
"Your mother cried. When she came out to the car."
"I didn't know."
"She wouldn't want you to."
They stood in the vestibule with their arms linked. He didn't say anything else, and somewhere on the other side of the doors the music began. Her father's hand came up and adjusted his tie, and Noelle thought:He's going to walk me down an aisle, hand me to a stranger and he'll do it without ever once, in the whole ceremony, meeting my eyes.
The aisle wasn't long. She'd expected it to feel long. It was the shortest walk of her life.
Faces turned. Attention tracked. Somewhere a woman sighed the appreciative sigh women sighed at weddings, and somewhere else a program fluttered, and Noelle was aware of all of it at the periphery of her vision and none of it at the center. The center was at the end of the aisle.
Elias stood there.
He'd dressed the way he'd dressed the night of the engagement party, the same dark suit, the same knot at his throat. His hair was the same. His posture was the same. His face was the same handsome visage.
But in the afternoon light coming in from the lake-facing windows, she saw him in a way she hadn't seen him at night. The candles at the altar threw warmth up into his face, found the gold in the hazel of his eyes, the faint shadow of a beard he must have shaved that morning and forgotten about by now. His mouth, which had looked hard across a crowded room looked, in this light, like the mouth of a man who knew how to be tender and had decided against it. He was, she realized with a dry smalljolt, more handsome than she'd let herself admit. Handsome in a way that was not going to make anything about this easier.
His eyes when they found her in the doorway and tracked her down the length of the aisle did something she hadn't expected.
They didn't soften. She wouldn't have been able to live with it if they'd softened. What they did was narrow, as though something about the sight of her in white had caught him off guard. Whatever he'd seen was put away somewhere, and the face that finished watching her walk was the face he'd walked away from her with nights ago. The attentive courtesy. The door gently closed.
She stopped in front of him. Her father placed her hand in his.
There,she thought, and the thought surprised her with its ugliness.There it is. The reach across the table. Only it isn't his hand. It's someone else's.
Her father stepped back. He didn't look at her. He didn't look at Elias. He returned to his seat.
Elias's hand closed around hers.
It was the first thing about him that had ever surprised her. His grip was warm. She'd prepared herself for something cool and contained, something to match the rest of him, and instead his palm against hers was warm the way a living thing is warm. Blood moving under skin, the heat of a body that had walked through the morning, stood at an altar and was now holding her hand because that was what the ceremony required of him.
He didn't let go when the officiant began to speak.
She'd assumed he would. A polite clasp, a release. That was what the rehearsal had been. But his fingers stayed closed around hers, and the pad of his thumb rested once, lightly, against the thin skin of her wrist.
She kept her face still. She'd been practicing.
The officiant spoke of commitment. Of partnership. Of trust. The words passed over them the way wind passes over water, and Noelle said the words she was meant to say when she was meant to say them. She meant them as far as she was able, which wasn't as far as the words reached but was further than she'd expected to be able to mean anything today.
Then it was his turn.
"Do you take?—"
"Yes."
It came a breath too early. A fraction of a second. A few raised eyebrows from the front rows, the officiant's face arranging itself gracefully around the interruption.
Noelle lifted her eyes to Elias's. What she found was the face he'd been wearing since she walked down the aisle. Composed. Attentive. The door still gently closed.
But his hand. His hand around hers had tightened. Just for a second. So briefly she couldn't have sworn to it if anyone had asked her. His thumb pressed once against the thin skin of her wrist and then released.”
