Something shifted in Rhys’s jaw. He didn’t raise his voice. He turned instead, slowly, toward my father, who was still holding the microphone like a man who’d forgotten it was in his hand.
“You’re Victor,” Rhys said. Not a question.
“Husband,” my father repeated, the word landing strangely in his mouth. “Evelyn doesn’t have a husband.”
“For eighteen months, I have,” Rhys said. “Which, given what I just watched happen to my wife’s dress and my wife’s dignity in the same thirty seconds, is a fact I’m now regretting not making a great deal louder a great deal sooner.”
My mother appeared at Victor’s elbow, her carefully composed face beginning to crack at the edges. “Evelyn, is this — is he serious?”
“We got married eighteen months ago,” I said, and I found, to my own surprise, that my voice came out steady, even warm, the way you’d deliver good news rather than a confession. “Courthouse. Two witnesses. I didn’t tell any of you because I knew exactly what would happen to it if I did.”
“What would have happened?” Victor demanded, some of his old bluster clawing its way back now that he had an argument to fight instead of a stranger to place.
“This,” I said, gesturing, with my still-damp hair and my backup dress, at the entire room. “This is what would have happened. You’d have found some way to make my marriage into a joke, the same way you made everything else about me into a joke, for thirty-two years, right up until you decided the joke needed a physical punchline and pushed me into a fountain.”
Maren, my sister, the bride, stood a few feet away in her white dress, looking between me and our father with an expression I hadn’t seen on her face since we were teenagers — something that looked almost like recognition, almost like shame, quickly suppressed.
“Dad,” she said quietly. “You actually pushed her?”
