Remove the Cast or Leave the Party

I had been her bridesmaid-in-chief since the engagement — eleven months of spreadsheets, three dress fittings, one bachelorette I planned to military standards. Two weeks out, I came off my bike and broke my wrist in two places. Lime green cast; the nurse let me pick, and I was feeling optimistic.

The bride's first text upon seeing the photo was: 'Can they do it in nude?' I thought she was joking and replied with a joke. Her second text was not a joke. It was a paragraph, and its topic sentence has since entered my family's permanent vocabulary: 'I'm not being dramatic but the cast isn't in the palette.'

There followed, over three days, an escalating series of proposals from her side: a nude-toned recast ('I called the clinic, they said medically unnecessary but POSSIBLE'), a custom satin sleeve her seamstress could run up, my standing at the far end of the lineup with my arm 'behind Priya', and — the summit — a suggestion that I attend the ceremony as a guest rather than a bridesmaid and 'rejoin the aesthetic' at the dinner, once photos were done.

I offered a compromise: white cast, ribbon wrapped. She responded with a mood board of the lineup with me photoshopped out 'just to see the balance'. Just to see the balance. I have that image saved. It is my favourite piece of evidence about anything.

So I attended as a guest, in my bridesmaid dress, which I had after all paid for, with my lime-green arm in a matching lime sling I had made specially. I sat in the fourth row and waved the cast gently during the processional like a tiny fluorescent flag.

The marriage lasted nineteen months. The wrist healed perfectly. At her second wedding — smaller, kinder, to a much better man — she asked me to stand with her again, and apologised, first, unprompted, in writing. I checked the message for palette clauses. It was clean. I said yes.