His face softened at that, but he did not put the dress away. “That is exactly why I have to do it.”
He told me that the dress could not remain hidden in a garment bag, untouched because everyone was afraid of remembering what it belonged to. Mary had been planning to wear it on the day they were supposed to graduate together. If he walked across the stage in it, she would not be there in the way we had once imagined, but she would not be absent from the day either.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that love did not have to prove itself in front of six hundred people. But I also knew what had happened to him after Mary died. He had stopped talking about college, then graduation, then nearly everything else. The dress was the first thing he had spoken about with certainty.
