I set down my fork.
I don’t want Italy, I said. I don’t want a ballroom. I don’t want two hundred guests or a string quartet or any of it.
He looked up from the last of the dessert. No?
I shook my head. I want something small, I said. Just family. Maybe the backyard. Maybe a courthouse on a Tuesday afternoon, I honestly don’t care. I just think that after ten years, I’d like to make it official.
And I watched his face change. That is the part I keep coming back to, even now, long after it stopped having any power to hurt me. His face changed so fast it shocked me, the warmth draining out of it and something else settling in, something I had never seen aimed at me before. He put his fork down. He leaned back in his chair, putting distance between us, and he gave a short, cold laugh, a laugh with no humor in it at all, a laugh like a door closing.
I’m never marrying you, Sarah.
The room seemed to sharpen and tilt. At another table, someone laughed too loudly at a joke I couldn’t hear. A server passed behind me with a tray of drinks, the ice clinking, and the ordinariness of it all felt obscene against what had just been said. I heard myself speak, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.
You don’t have to say it like that.
He shrugged, one shoulder rising and falling, an insultingly casual motion. Better than dragging this out again, he said.
Again. That word landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there. Again, as if I were tedious. As if I had been badgering him for a decade, waving venue contracts in his face, making his life difficult with my needy little questions, instead of what I had actually done, which was to raise the subject of our shared future a handful of gentle times over ten years and let it drop every single time he wanted me to.
So that’s it, I said.
