What I did not know, during those sleepless hours between 2 AM and 6 AM, was that while I was staring at the ceiling of a Holiday Inn Express, Jillian was driving to her mother's house. She had left the rehearsal dinner around 11 PM. She had driven forty-five minutes to her mother Marion's house in West Ashley, where Marion had been staying while the wedding preparations were happening. Jillian had woken Marion up at midnight. And Jillian had asked her mother a question that,

Marion told me later at the reception, made her cry on the spot. Jillian had asked: "Mom. Be honest with me. Be brutal. Do I look beautiful in the Monique Lhuillier?" Marion, who had paid for part of the dress, who had sat through all three of the fittings, who had told her daughter she was gorgeous seventeen different ways in April alone — Marion, finally, at midnight before her only daughter's wedding, did the thing I had been doing at dinner. She told the truth. She said: "Honey. I love you. The dress is not the dress. It has never been the dress. I have been praying for God to show you a way out of it for six months."