A room built not from necessity, but from gratitude.
You touch the wall lightly.
Then you look down at yourself.
You are still wearing the green dress.
Not because you planned to.
Not because there was nowhere else to go.
Because somehow, in the rush of gifts and signatures and tears and the exhaustion of the day after a wedding that cracked the world open, you never took it off before coming here. The old fabric hangs softly over your body, a little tired, a little too loose at the waist, a little frayed at one hem.
And suddenly you laugh.
Lara turns. “What?”
You shake your head. “Nothing.”
But it is not nothing.
It is the strange, tender humor of life.
That the very dress you thought might shame your son in front of the world became the thread that bound all of you more tightly together. That a garment worn thin by years and memory could walk into a church full of polished people and leave wearing glory. That a woman who planned to hide in the back pew would end the day in the front row, in the center of the dance floor, in the heart of a new family’s first promise.
