An Objection, With Slides

The couple had specifically asked the celebrant to skip the objections line. He was elderly, beloved, and running on muscle memory: out it came, the fatal invitation, 'or forever hold your peace,' followed by that traditional half-second of theatrical silence.

Into which a chair scraped.

The groom's ex-girlfriend — invited, incomprehensibly, by the groom's mother, who 'had always liked her' — stood up in row three, produced a laptop from a tote bag, opened it with the composure of a keynote speaker, and asked, and I quote the whole church's collective memory: 'Is there a projector, or should I just narrate?'

There was no projector. She narrated.

She had prepared — we pieced the structure together afterwards, the way survivors reconstruct a storm — approximately twelve minutes of material, organised chronologically, on the theme of why the groom remained, spiritually and legally-in-her-opinion, hers. Exhibits included a 2019 text thread, a concert ticket stub she held aloft like evidence at trial, and a shared playlist 'he never removed me from.'