Chapter Three The Wedding He Never Planned #2
Then the great doors swung wide, the organ swelled, and Graham found himself walking down what felt like a mile of crimson carpet under the weight of more curious eyes than he had ever faced in his life, his borrowed eyebrows prickling with sweat, his gloved hands cold as death, praying — genuinely, silently praying, in a way he had not prayed in years — that neither eyebrow would choose this moment to abandon its post.
Lord, he thought, half desperate, half laughing at his own predicament even now, if there was ever a man who needed Your help to get through the next five minutes without disaster, it's the one wearing another man's wedding party like a borrowed coat.
The young groomsman beside him steered him with whispered hints and small, discreet shoves into position at the front of the church, and Graham — bracing himself for whatever indignity came next, comforting himself with the thought that he had only to endure this until he could slip away unnoticed — settled in to wait out the ceremony.
The music dropped to something hushed and expectant, and slowly, gracefully, the bridal party began its progress up the aisle.
Graham kept his eyes down, fixed on some safely neutral point on the floor, determined not to look up and risk some fatal recognition — until, almost against his will, his gaze lifted, and he found the bride standing beside him.
She was small, and young, and so beautiful that for a moment Graham forgot entirely to be afraid.
Her face was pale — too pale, he thought, for a bride on her wedding day — framed in golden hair beneath a drift of white veil that seemed to breathe around her like mist. But it was not her beauty that struck him hardest. It was the sorrow in it — the soft, unmistakable sadness at the corners of her mouth, the way her lashes lay heavy and trembling against her white cheek, as though she were holding back some private grief by main force of will.
Why does she look like that, he thought, with an unreasoning stab of protectiveness that startled him, on the one day a woman is supposed to be happiest?
The minister's voice rose, warm and solemn, into the hush of the church, and the prayer that followed seemed, to Graham's overwrought nerves, to stretch on without end.
Under its cover he allowed himself one more long look at the girl beside him — and this time, as though she felt the weight of his attention, she raised her eyes to his.
They were full of tears.
It struck him like a blow — a single reproachful glance that seemed to look straight through the false mustache and borrowed name to whatever truth lay beneath, and to find him wanting.
Then her lashes fell again, the tears held somehow unshed, and Graham stood trembling in a way that had nothing at all to do with fear of discovery.
Everything the day had asked of him — the dog's wounded, trusting eyes; the small boy's whispered courage; and now this — seemed to converge in that single look and demand something of him he did not yet have words for.
The minister's voice gathered itself toward its close: Matthew 19:6 — "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."
And in the small, breathless pause that followed, the groom beside him pressed a plain gold ring into his hand.
Graham stared at it, uncomprehending. Surely the boy meant to take it back and place it himself — but Jefferson only whispered, urgent and low, "Put it on her finger," and stepped back half a pace, leaving Graham standing, ring in hand, before the bride's small, trembling glove.
This cannot be right, he thought, even as her ring finger separated itself, shyly, from the rest, and came forward to meet him.
This is not how it is done. But there was no one to correct him, no ripple of surprise moving through the watching crowd, and so, with a tenderness that surprised him more than anything else that whole impossible night, he slipped the ring onto her finger.
Her eyes lifted to his once more — the tears retreating now, though the ache behind them had not — and something passed between them that Graham had no name for and no time to examine, because in the very next instant the minister and the groom were both reaching for his hand, and before he understood what was happening, his fingers had closed around hers.
He held her hand as though it were something infinitely breakable, and as though, in holding it, he had promised her — silently, irrevocably — whatever she might ever ask of him.
She looked up at him with an expression he could not read, and it was only then, with her small cold hand trembling in his, that the truth broke over Graham whole and entire.
It was not Jefferson standing here at the center of this ceremony.
It was himself!
How had any of this happened? Had he actually said I do?
Had he mumbled the words while the minister guided him through the ceremony?
Had Jeff—or even the minister—fed him the answers while he drifted in a daze?
Had someone spoken on his behalf without him noticing?
He remembered hearing the groomsman announce that the Best Man had arrived.
So how, in all that chaos, had he ended up as the groom?
"I pronounce you man and wife," said the minister, in a voice that seemed to come from very far away, "and what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder."
Graham never realized he had unknowingly signed the wedding certificate, nor did he grasp that the true groom had requested a ceremony without vows—as though they were of Quaker persuasion.
When the officiant asked whether they both consented to the marriage, his new bride gave a small, confident nod—and as she lifted her eyes to him, he found himself nodding as well.