I told him I would be in the third row.
He told me he knew.
Part 5 — What the Photograph Started
The week after graduation, something happened that neither Ethan nor I had anticipated.
A woman named Susan Metcalfe, who had been sitting four rows behind me at the ceremony, posted a photograph on social media. She had taken it from behind. It showed Ethan walking down the center aisle in the red dress, and in the background, visible through the gap between two seats, you could see my hands holding the wallet-sized photograph Lily had placed in the pocket.
Susan wrote a caption describing what she had witnessed. She described the laughter that had filled the room before Ethan reached my row. She described the silence that followed. She described Dr. Okafor’s speech and the six hundred people standing.
She wrote that her daughter had been in Lily’s art class and that Lily had once given her daughter a painting of a bird made entirely of red brushstrokes because she said birds should always be the color of something that mattered.
