Terrence Jeffries and Sherri Griffin’s wedding

Terrence Jeffries and Sherri Griffin Jeffries’s wedding gathers Duan Jeffries’s family and brings him back into Kimani Cannon’s orbit. The celebration is more than a family milestone: as Duan watches a marriage founded on love, he finds his skepticism wavering, while his attraction to Kimani resurfaces in the middle of the festivities.

Arrival and Context

Duan had flown from Atlanta to Chicago after three months of work on a difficult murder case. He had assembled evidence for an attorney friend representing a man Duan believed had been framed by his own wife. He reached Chicago the day before the wedding and went straight from the airport to the church in time for the rehearsal dinner, bringing the fatigue of sustained investigative work into the family celebration.

The Wedding and Duan’s Family

During the wedding reception, Duan stands on the sidelines as his younger brother escorts Sherri around the huge ballroom. The newlyweds thank the many guests who have come to celebrate with them. Duan had recognized from the start that Sherri could make Terrence happy; the affection between them has made him, despite his cynicism about true love, somewhat more willing to believe in it.

The wedding is one of several examples Duan considers. He also sees genuine love in the marriage of his sister, Olivia Jeffries Westmoreland, and Reggie Westmoreland, and in the recent marriage of his father, Orin Jeffries, to the woman who had long served as his administrative assistant. Thinking of his father’s happiness leads Duan toward the painful contrast of his own childhood: his mother left Orin and their three children when Duan was twelve, Terrence was ten, and their younger sister was three. He turns away from that memory and checks his watch, tired and edgy after his travel and work.

Kimani Cannon at the Reception

Across the room, Duan notices Kimani talking with the bride’s parents. She is Sherri’s best friend, and he has been attracted to her since they met a few months earlier at Terrence and Sherri’s engagement party in the Florida Keys. He remembers their powerful sexual chemistry and had interpreted her look then as a promise that they would eventually sleep together. That possibility was interrupted when an important tip on his case forced him to leave before anything happened.

At the wedding, his attraction returns immediately and intensely. He takes in her dark eyes, pixie nose, full lips, and dark brown curls, and thinks of her in explicitly sexual terms. The moment sets the family’s public celebration of commitment beside a connection Duan has so far imagined chiefly as physical. It also gives the wedding a personal consequence for him: among all the guests gathered to honor Terrence and Sherri, Kimani is the person who draws his attention away from the room.