The ceremony was held in the hotel’s garden — a small, walled courtyard with a magnolia tree and iron chairs and Aldous crying before Sasha-Kaye even reached him. I stood at the front with the other bridesmaids and kept my gaze forward and tried not to locate Tomasz in the rows of guests.
I located Reginald instead.
He was standing at the groom’s side, hands clasped, watching the ceremony with the focused stillness of someone who understood what they were witnessing. At one point he glanced at me.
Not a quick look. A real one.
Long enough that I felt it in my sternum.
I looked away first. I always looked away first.
The reception moved inside to the hotel’s ballroom — high ceilings, pale blue walls, the scent of gardenias so thick it felt like a second atmosphere. Delia was already at the bar. The string quartet was playing something that walked the line between elegant and weepy.
Tomasz found me during the cocktail hour.
Of course he did.
“You look incredible,” he said, as if that were a neutral observation and not the opening move of something.
“Thank you.” I held my champagne with both hands.
“I heard you’re still at the college. Literary history.”
“Still there, yes.”
He tilted his head the way he did when he was about to say something he’d rehearsed. “I’ve thought about calling you.”
And there it was.
The thing about Tomasz was that he wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t a villain in my story. He was just someone who had always needed more space than he was willing to admit, and I had spent two years trying to compress myself into whatever shape fit the room he was willing to offer.
I was tired of being compressed.
“You should have,” I said. “A year ago, you should have. But not now, Tomasz. Not today.”
He blinked. I think he’d expected more resistance, or maybe more softness. I’d spent so long giving him one or the other.
I walked away. My hands were steadier than I expected.
Reginald was near the ballroom doors, talking to one of Aldous’s brothers. He saw me cross the room. Something in his expression shifted — not dramatically, just a small recalibration, like he was adjusting his understanding of something.
He excused himself and fell into step beside me.
“You okay?”
“Getting there.”
We stepped out into the corridor — wide, quiet, the old hotel settling around us with its creaks and its gardenias.
“Was that—”
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t want to say his name again. “It was.”
Reginald nodded slowly. He had this quality of absorbing information without rushing to respond to it, which I had always found either maddening or deeply comforting depending on the day.
Today it was comforting.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you looked like yourself out there. When you walked away.”
I turned to look at him.
“What does that mean?”
“It means—” He paused. Reginald always chose his words like he was selecting the right tool for delicate work. “Sometimes I watch you make yourself smaller. At department meetings. At Sasha-Kaye’s birthday. You did it less just now.”
The corridor felt very still.
“You noticed that?”
“I notice a lot of things about you, Sherica.”
That was the second sharp moment. Not a declaration exactly. Just the truth, laid out plainly, the way he laid out everything.
I didn’t know what to do with it in real time. So I said, “We should go back in,” and he said, “Probably,” and neither of us moved for another ten seconds.
The reception carried us back into its current — toasts and dancing and Delia getting increasingly philosophical about love with anyone who would listen. Sasha-Kaye danced with Aldous to something slow and looked at him the way I’d always hoped someone would look at me.
Tomasz left early. I saw his coat disappear through the lobby doors and felt something release in my ribcage.
Late in the evening, the crowd thinned. The quartet had been replaced by a playlist. Most of the older guests had drifted upstairs.
Reginald found me on the small balcony off the ballroom — a narrow iron affair overlooking the courtyard where the ceremony had been, the magnolia tree still lit from below, the Edison lights still strung and glowing.
He brought me a glass of water without being asked.
I took it. Our fingers overlapped on the glass for a moment.
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