“Where is the groom?”—the clergyman asked, with strain in his voice, wearing a long dirty-gray cassock.
Silence… I squeezed the bouquet in my hands, feeling how the flower stems painfully dug into my palms. My head was spinning from the stuffiness and the smell of incense. Suddenly my wedding dress seemed unbearably heavy, as if it were made of lead.
“Lady Morey,” the temple servant addressed me, holding an crimson ribbon meant to bind the couple’s marriage vows—“where is your true one?”