"Not now. Not like this." He turned to the Reverend. "I'm sorry. Tell them—tell them whatever you need to tell them. There's food at the hall. They should eat it. I can't—" He stopped. The sentence he might have finished was I can't marry anyone while my wife is still in my daughter's hand, and the word wife was the wrong tense and the right one.
Reverend Bell nodded once, a pastor who had buried younger people than Claire and married sadder men than David and did not confuse a ritual with a solution. He faced the pews. "Friends," he said, "there will be no wedding this afternoon. Please give this family the dignity of a quiet exit. If you wish to go to the hall, the meal is paid for and you are welcome to it. If you wish to go home, go with our thanks. Hold these people in your prayers, and refrain, if you can, from turning a private grief into a story you tell tonight."
It was a good speech. It would fail. Stories do not obey reverends.
Lauren set the bouquet on the altar rail as if returning something she had borrowed. Her hands were free then. She did not reach for David. She looked at Emma with an expression Emma would remember for years and misname, at first, as anger. It was fear, and under the fear a kind of recognition, the look of a woman seeing a door she had described accurately to herself and still hoped was locked.
"I will be in the vesting room," Lauren said. "If either of you wants me."