Stephanie & Simon

Stephanie and Simon met at work. Colleagues first, entirely properly, and then friends, rather less properly. Friendship turned into dating, dating turned into living together, and eventually Simon proposed in the middle of a pandemic, which put the destination wedding they wanted somewhere off in the distance for a while.

They waited, which is consistent with them. At home in Toronto their evenings are cooking together, a glass of wine, a film, and enough disagreement about which film to keep it interesting. Weekends are for going somewhere, across the world or around the corner, always the two of them.

When they finally got to Curaçao they brought twenty-two people. Their closest friends, their siblings, and nobody else.

A wedding weekend starts when people land, not when the ceremony does. Everyone arrived to a welcome basket: a few things from the island, and a few things they hadn't thought to pack and were glad to find.

The rehearsal dinner was on the balcony at Grand Café Gouverneur de Rouville, above the harbour, timed for the light going down over the water. Cars there and back, so nobody was working out how to get anywhere on the first evening.

The design changed halfway through planning. It began with peonies and pastels, soft and lovely, and at some point it became clear that a tropical wedding was being asked to look like a wedding anywhere else. So the blush and ivory went, and the boldest flowers on the island came in.

They stood in front of a half-moon floral backdrop for their vows, on the beach at Avila, with the flowers doing exactly what pastels could not have done against that water.

A saxophone and piano duo played through cocktail hour while the sky went gold, one of those sunsets that only happens when there's rain somewhere in the air. Their portraits were taken in that light, which was fortunate, because the clouds meant it.

The cake was standing in front of their ceremony arch and the light was going fast, so we brought the cutting forward and did it there while the sky was still worth photographing. Cake at sunset rather than cake under a spotlight three hours later.

Then everyone walked down to the tables. They were standing at their seats when the rain started.

So everything moved. Flowers, candles, goblets, the lot, lifted off the sand and set down again indoors while twenty-two people were still holding their drinks. The music didn't stop. They sat down more or less on time, somewhere they hadn't expected to be, and the rain carried on outside for the rest of the evening as part of the sound.