Sunburned and jet lagged from my Mexican honeymoon, I head to my mom’s house, where she has summoned me to collect some wedding gifts and cards in her care. The photo gallery in her foyer stops me cold. She rearranged it to accommodate a new focal point, a large, framed photo of Chris and me on our wedding day.

In it, we perch on a stone bench at the edge of the lake, which glitters behind us. The dwindling evening sun washes the scene in muted gold light.

I face Chris, my dress pooling on the grass around me, my veil trailing down my back. Broad and solid in his tuxedo, he leans toward me, his fingers entwining mine. We look into each other’s eyes.

I turn to my mom, who has appeared behind me. “Where did this come from?”

She reminds me of the contentious wedding guest list, which she insisted must include her friend Betsy, the worst kind of Catholic: always performing piety for an audience, always backbiting when they turn away. My mom tells me that during the pre-reception cocktail hour, Betsy, no doubt wobbling from an excess of chardonnay, stepped out to the terrace.

The discovery of Chris and me on the bench surprised her.  She snapped a picture, capturing our only escape that day from a crush of guests, an entourage of bridesmaids and groomsmen, and an orbit of photographers.

“Betsy sent it to me,” my mom explains. Another person might have felt sheepish, stumbling upon such an intimacy.

Heat rises in my cheeks. “Why did you frame it?”

“I had one framed for you and Chris, too. I thought it would be a nice surprise.” She points to a rectangular package resting against the wall. “It’s beautiful.  Everyone says so.”

“Who’s ‘everyone?’”

“Well –” a pinch appears between her eyebrows – “I sent it to some friends.  And the family.” My distress flusters her. “I just think it’s so beautiful.”

“It was a private moment, Mom. It was supposed to be.”

At home that night, I wait for Chris to fall asleep. Then I remove the brown paper wrapping from my copy of the picture. Studying it is like contemplating a nude of my new husband and myself, done without our knowledge, then widely distributed, and displayed in my mom’s foyer.

Before our reception, the photographers arranged our bridal party and us on the venue’s manicured grounds in a final series of “whimsical, playing around outside” shots. At my welling tears, Chris waved them all inside, saying we’d follow in a minute. Then he led me to the bench. “What’s wrong?”

I tried to explain myself. The groomsmen were blackout drunk. They were groping the bridesmaids. The best man could hardly walk, let alone give a speech in the next half an hour.

“They’re just having fun.” Then his face fell. “This is because of the bachelor party, right? You hate my friends now.”

I always had.  I had counted on their help.

Knowing they were planning the party, knowing they would bring strippers to the house who would do much more than strip for the right price, I had told Chris, “You have to stop them.”

He said he would.

I’d told him, “If you don’t shut this down, I won’t marry you.”

He said he understood.

I knew he would not oppose his friends. I knew the party would happen exactly as I had envisioned. The day after, my mom rushed to my side to calm and comfort me, to talk some sense into me. She mistook my frenzy for despair.

In the end, I yielded just as he had. The machinery that had caught me by the hem of my dress was too big, too expensive, too elaborate.

I dabbed my eyes. He glanced up the hill toward the club. Then he leaned in and took my hand. “Look at me.”

I forced myself to meet his gaze, sure that he would see it then: this marriage would not last the year.

Click. Betsy took our picture, which really is beautiful. Everyone says so. It looks like love.

“Please. Let’s go inside.” In my face he’d seen something else, something he could manage, like nerves or too much champagne. “Everyone’s waiting.”

Everyone – nearly three hundred people, including a DJ, poised with a microphone. When he announced us, we bounded into the room like professional wrestlers, music thudding, lights flashing.

I rewrap the framed photo and hide it behind stacks of shoeboxes in the closet.  I click on the TV. A few minutes later, a feeble “Tish?” drifts from the bedroom.

Chris has woken up and asks me to bring the aloe. As gently as possible, I apply the cool goop to his peeling shoulders and back.

He moans into the pillow. “This hurts. This fucking hurts.”

This is nothing. I hate my thoughts, hate my cowardice, hate myself. Just wait.