... He pushes the bride into a spin, but when he turns, to spin off her, his hand does not catch hers; instead it catches the string of pearls... and when he spins, the string breaks. The priest freezes as the pearls slip off the string. He watches how they hop off the polished floor and roll in his direction. One pearl hits the skirting board, rolls back past Miss Dunne’s outstretched hand. She lets out a sigh as it rolls back towards the priest’s chair. He puts his hand down and lifts it. It is warm in his hand, warm from her. This, more than anything else in the day, startles him.
The priest walks across the dance floor. The bride is standing there with her hands out. When he places the pearl in her hand, she looks into his eyes. There are tears there but she is too proud to blink and let one fall. If she blinked, he would take her hand and take her away from this place. This, at least, is what he tells himself. It’s what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human.
‘I am so sorry,’ he says.
He looks at the fragile lines in her open palms, at the pearls accumulating. He lifts his eyes back to her face.
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