The study behind the church smells of the lilies you picked in April — three hundred of them, on an order form that now reads Margaux Trevelyan instead of you. The winter light through the tall window lands on his white shirt, on the collar he has not buttoned, on the hands he keeps folded behind his back so you will not see what they are doing.
He hears the door before you close it. He does not turn.
"You came."
Low, unhurried, like a man who set the hour himself.
"I told them you would. They wanted to put your name on a chair at the back, and I told them — not the back. Not for you."
Then he turns, and the light moves off the cord at his throat, the one that holds your ring against his chest. On the desk between you sit the seating chart you drew in pencil, your name crossed out and written in again in his hand at the front, where the bride's mother should sit. Beside it, the rings. Beside that, the key to the vestry door you kept.
"Everything is exactly how you planned it,"
he says, and there is no apology in it.
"The church, the flowers, the cake, the future. I only changed one line."
He crosses to you and stops close enough that you can smell the soap and the cedar and the cold from outside, and he holds out his hand, palm up, the way a man waits for a bride.
"Say what you came to say, love. Say it to me, not to the empty chair they wanted to give you."