I got lost in the fantasy. I made up guest lists and revised them and thought about what colours would be nice in a bathroom. Until the night before, I had only dreams of being married, but I was still a child, dreaming.

We were to have eighty people, and my dress was white. The wedding would be held in our Anglican church, to which none of us had gone for years, and the reception would be afterwards at a restaurant with a banquet room. Probably we were all living in this dream.

A month before the wedding we drove to Toronto, Stephen and my parents and I, and found a one-bedroom apartment over a store. It wasn’t far by bus to the university, and the rent was eighty dollars a month, which seemed like a fortune to us then and was. I might earn, we thought, about seventy-five dollars a week. Stephen’s parents said they would pay his tuition fees so long as he kept his marks up, and he would get jobs in the summers. He had three years left at university. My mother said only, “Be sure not to have children, it would be impossible then.”

Our parents got together and bought us a bedroom suite for a wedding gift. For the rest we went to second-hand stores and bought a table and chairs, two lamps and a couch, and that was the total of the furniture we ever had in that little apartment. The colour of the bathroom was not what I’d had in mind.

The wedding invitations were sent, and three people had showers for me. It was exciting and romantic, and above all that I had dependable, solid Stephen and his love. I was the first and the others were filled with envy. We fussed over each other, my friends and I, and we cried together because we knew it would not be the same again, and it was a very sad, but proud time, too. I was putting away childish things.

Until, that is, the night before the wedding, when I saw for just a moment. We would be in our apartment on our wedding night because we could not afford a real honeymoon. Tomorrow, twenty-four hours, so close, I would be in that apartment with this young man, and how well did I really know him anyway, with the shabby furniture and the need to find a job and keep a home together while he went to school, and that would be my life for the next three years. I was horrified by what I had agreed to. I was bewildered that I had not seen it before.