Everybody said yes eventually. My mother cried the first time she watched him rehearse the walk in our living room, counting his steps out loud, one hand extended toward an imaginary version of me. Julian, my fiancé, said it was the only version of that day that actually made sense to him.
"Your dad's not walking through that door," he told me one night, three months before the wedding. "But Dominic's the closest thing to it. He's been standing beside you your whole life too, just in a different way than your dad did."
I believed, for a while, that the hardest conversation about all of this was already behind me.
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Then, three weeks before the wedding, Julian's mother brought it up over dinner.
Both of us were at that table. Her own son sitting right there beside me.
"He can come, obviously," Patricia said, setting down her fork with the particular precision of someone who'd rehearsed the sentence beforehand. "Nobody's saying he can't come to the wedding."
"Mom," Julian said.
"I'm saying he doesn't have to be in it," she continued, like Julian hadn't spoken at all. "Sweetheart, think practically. It isn't just one photo. It's the entire aisle sequence, the album, the enlargement — what goes above the fireplace too."
She said it like it had already been decided somewhere, in some meeting none of us had been invited to.
"His face will be in every single frame," she said. "You'll be looking at that for forty years. I don't want those photographs."
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