My fiancée walked down the aisle wearing an oversized old men’s suit.
Nobody knew she was going to do it.
Not me.
Not my family.
And judging by the way people started whispering, apparently not most of hers either.
I’m 34, and Claire is 31.
We’d been together for five years before I proposed.
I had been looking forward to our wedding more than I probably admitted.
I’m not somebody who needed some huge luxury event, but I wanted the normal stuff.
I wanted to stand at the front, see Claire come down the aisle in a wedding dress, have dinner with everyone we loved, take too many pictures, dance badly, and finally call her my wife.
Claire knew that.
She wasn’t obsessed with wedding planning, but she seemed completely on board.
We picked a small outdoor venue.
She chose flowers.
She argued with me about the cake flavor.
She spent weeks deciding whether she wanted her hair up or down.
The only thing she was strangely private about was her dress.
I never saw it.
She told me she wanted the first time I saw her in it to be when she walked down the aisle.
That sounded normal enough.
Her mom went shopping with her.
One of her bridesmaids went to at least one fitting.
There were garment bags being moved around that I was specifically told not to look at.
So I had absolutely no reason to think anything unusual was going on.
The morning of the wedding, I was nervous in a good way.
My brother, Sam, and two of my closest friends got ready with me.
We drank coffee, joked around, and kept checking the weather because the forecast had been changing all week.
About half an hour before the ceremony, one of Claire’s bridesmaids walked past us.
She looked stressed.
I remember asking, “Everything okay?”
She stopped for a second.
Then she said, “Yeah.
Claire’s fine.”
Which was not exactly what I had asked.
I thought maybe Claire was nervous.
That made sense.
