The Vows I Chose
An hour before the ceremony, while my maid of honor was downstairs sorting out a confusion with the florist and my mother was in the reception hall rearranging place cards for the third time, I stood barefoot in the bridal suite of St. Andrew’s Chapel gripping the edge of the vanity with one hand and pressing the other against my belly. The pain had started that morning as a dull pull low in my back, something I told myself was nerves, stress, the baby responding to my heartbeat the way he always did when I was anxious.
He was thirty two weeks along. He was not due for another eight. But my body had been unreliable all day, tight and heavy in a way that went beyond the ordinary discomfort of late pregnancy, and the waves had grown sharper in the past hour, arriving and receding with a rhythm I did not yet recognize for what it was.
The bridal suite was a small room on the second floor of the chapel, cream walls and old wood and a window that overlooked the parking lot where guests were still arriving, women in bright dresses holding their hair against the wind, men adjusting ties in car mirrors. My wedding dress hung heavy on my frame, a cathedral length gown with lace sleeves and pearl buttons down the back that my mother and I had chosen at a boutique in March when I was still small enough to stand on the fitting platform without losing my balance. The veil was pinned into my hair already.
The bouquet sat on the vanity beside a tube of lipstick and a folded piece of stationery on which I had written my vows that morning in careful blue ink. I had written them sitting cross legged on the hotel bed at six in the morning while Ethan slept in the room next door, because we had agreed to spend the night apart before the wedding, one of those small traditions he pretended to find charming. I wrote about the night we met at a charity fundraiser downtown, how he had leaned against the bar and told me I looked like someone who had better things to do than talk to him, and how I had laughed and stayed anyway.
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