The Search for Lily Myers ✓

17 | Everything Has Changed

In times of trouble, sometimes all Amelia could do was turn to the discography of Taylor Swift.

As she walked out to her car, she decided that she was going to spend her drive to the wedding listening to happy love songs as a last-ditch effort to at least pretend she was in a cheerful mood. She was going to have to fake it in front of other people all evening long, after all, so she might as well get some practice in now. But she quickly ran into the issue of not actually having a lot of upbeat romantic songs at the ready in her playlist, so she ended up with "Love Story" on loop for the entire twenty-five minutes.

The church where the wedding was being held was right near the heart of downtown and so navigating through traffic was somewhat of an ordeal, but she'd left early enough to still arrive with a few more minutes to spare than she planned on. She smoothed the crinkles out of her dress when she climbed out of her car, readjusting her shawl around her shoulders before heading inside to find her parents.

A small line of people was steadily trickling through the massive wooden doors, each pausing to write their name in the guestbook and leave a note for the happy couple if they wished to. A cold draft of air conditioning tickled Amelia's arms as she stepped inside; she signed her name and scribbled down a depressingly generic note of well wishes. She had never made enough of an effort to get to know her mother's friend that well. As a child, she always shrank into herself and scampered off to play with her dolls instead of talking to adults; as a teenager, she'd lock herself away to read a book or get her homework done. This didn't negate the fact that she genuinely appreciated the positive impact Suzy'd had on her mother's life, but it did mean that she didn't have much of anything novel to say on a day like today.

It was difficult for her not to feel a little bit out of place, both because of her general feeling of loneliness and because everyone else surrounding her appeared to either be much older than she was or much younger. She spotted several kids who must have been dragged along with their parents: little girls tugging at their mother's skirts and boys restlessly chasing each other around the atrium only to be quietly scolded. At least she vaguely recognized some of their faces, men and women whom she'd seen in the nearby pews at church years ago when she wasn't much taller than the children she was now watching run around.

The lobby and chapel were lavishly decorated in shades of rose and cream, with ribbons and flower arrangements adorning virtually every surface that could accommodate them. Amelia wasn't quite sure how she felt about the sheer volume of it, but the effect was certainly grandiose and she assumed that was the intent. She spotted her parents already in their seats, the one between them left empty for her, their buffer. They were making small talk when she approached and accepted her fate, smoothing the back of her dress out under her thighs as she sat down. She couldn't remember the last time she saw either of them this dressed up. It was odd, almost funny, to see them in a context that wasn't the norm.

Her mother reached up to dotingly touch Amelia's hair, tucking a strand of it behind her ear. "You look beautiful."

"Thanks, Mom."

To her slight surprise, the ceremony actually offered her a small sense of groundedness, a reminder that the rest of the world didn't hobble and tilt according to her swaying moods. It was a touching tribute to the bride and groom—Amelia caught her mom's eyes glossing over with tears at one point—and her ability to be moved by it was of genuine relief to her. Here was proof that at the very least, she wasn't completely casting her current cynicism about romance outwards onto everyone else. She just wished that was enough to stop it from festering inside herself.

Amelia clapped and cheered along with everyone else as the bridal party made their exit, but the space where her heart should have been still felt halfway hollowed out. She thought it was peculiar, unsettling even, that it was possible to hold such joy and such grief simultaneously.