I want you to understand the decision I made next, because I can still replay the conversation I had with myself in the week between Paige's call and the Saturday of the wedding. I was not invited. I had been asked, explicitly, not to attend. My wife's family was begging me to let it go — not because they thought I was wrong, but because they had done everything they could, and they believed that Meredith had the right to make her own mistake. I asked Tish what she thought. Tish sat with me on

our back porch at 11 PM on a Thursday night, and she said, "Gerald. If you were Meredith, in that dress, about to marry a man who is legally someone else's husband, would you want some cousin's husband you barely know to show up? Or would you want a lifetime of wondering if the one person who tried to warn you had given up because it was socially awkward?" I looked at her. I said, "Honey." She said, "I'm telling you to go. I'll explain it to my family afterward. But I cannot live with us knowing what we know and letting a wedding happen anyway. Go." I went to Men's Wearhouse on Friday. I bought the suit that did not fit. I printed the file. I drove ninety minutes to Savannah on Saturday morning.