Ivory and Gold

The chapel doors opened, and three hundred guests rose like a single golden wave.

Vanessa Merrick did not remember walking down the aisle. She remembered her father's arm rigid under her hand, the scent of white peonies, and Weston Falconer's face at the altar — steady, disbelieving, like he still couldn't accept his luck.

"You look," he whispered when she reached him, "like you walked out of a painting."

"Don't cry," she whispered back. "Your grandmother's watching."

Odette Falconer sat in the front pew in ivory silk, cane resting against her knee, dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief older than the building itself. Behind her, a chart-sized family tree stood on an easel — gold calligraphy tracing the Falconer name back eleven generations, to a knight, a title, a coat of arms with a rearing hawk.

Gerald Merrick had commissioned that easel himself. He'd told anyone who'd listen for six months: My daughter is marrying into eight hundred years of history.

The vows were short. The kiss was longer than protocol allowed, and nobody minded.

At the reception, under a tent strung with a thousand fairy lights, Vanessa danced with her new husband while a string quartet played something her mother had chosen without asking her. She caught her father's eye across the floor — Gerald, beaming, lifting his champagne an inch in silent toast.

Then she saw the man beside him.

Thin, silver-haired, dressed not in black tie but a rumpled tweed jacket that didn't belong at a wedding this size, he gripped a leather folder in both hands like it might try to leave him. Vanessa recognized him vaguely — the genealogist her father had hired, the one who'd spent four months compiling the Falconer lineage into a leather-bound gift for tonight.

He wasn't smiling. He leaned close to Gerald's ear and said something short.

Vanessa watched her father's champagne-flushed face go the color of the tablecloths.

Gerald set down his glass without finishing it, and followed the man out of the tent.