The ceremony was set for ten past five in March, on the outer edge of a private cay, with the lagoon at its back and the canopy of the Yucatán to the west. Sarah arrived the morning before. She had three dresses, two of which she had already decided against, and a length of Belgian lace her grandmother had carried from Antwerp at twenty.
The week was warm in the way only the Yucatán is warm. Mornings began before five. Sarah and her mother walked the boardwalks at the property's edge, where the herons stand still long enough to be photographed. We met them there with one camera and one bottle of water. We did not speak for the first half hour. The sun came up behind the mangroves the color of cut peach, and Sarah cried briefly, and then she laughed, and then she said good morning to her mother in French, which we did not know she spoke.
The wedding day was small by Rosewood standards: ninety guests, drawn from Boston, from Mexico City, from Lyon. The first look was held inside a closed pavilion with the doors shut, the way a private film screening is held. Michael had not seen the dress. He saw it through three feet of clear air, and the photograph IVAE made of that moment is the photograph their families have framed on three continents.
The ceremony itself was nineteen minutes long. Vows were read in English and in French, the rings exchanged in Spanish, and the recessional carried the couple back through a corridor of guests holding paper lanterns lit from inside. Golden hour fell at 6:33. We had ninety minutes scheduled for portraits and used twenty-eight. The rest of the time was given back to the couple, who walked the beach barefoot in the dress and the suit, and who returned to the reception cocktail-warm and quietly stunned.
The first frames were delivered seventy-one hours after the ceremony. The full gallery, six hundred and eighty-four images, traveled to a private link six days later. The cinematic film was delivered five weeks and three days after the wedding. Three months on, Sarah wrote to say she had stopped looking at photographs of other weddings.
