One man brought photographs.
Reed hated that.
I loved it.
There was nineteen-year-old Reed, painfully thin, standing beside Walter outside Harbor House.
And there was the hat.
Walter was wearing it.
I looked across the reception area at my new husband.
He was talking to my father.
Same hat.
Same crooked brim.
For the first time, I understood that something I had thought was just one of Reed’s weird habits carried an entire chapter of his life inside it.
We didn’t have some magical conversation that fixed everything that night.
We danced.
We ate cake.
We thanked people.
We went home exhausted.
The next morning, over coffee and leftover wedding cake, I asked Reed questions for almost three hours.
Some answers were hard.
Some were boring.
A few made me angry all over again.
For months afterward, trust became something we talked about more deliberately.
Reed started seeing a therapist too.
