Small scallop shell tattoo on a finger

The sand is still in my handbag three weeks after Dougie and Priya married at Skerrick Cove, and I haven't had the heart to shake it out. Your mum says I'm being soppy. She's right, but she's also the one who went down to the rocks at six that morning with a bread bag and a head torch, and came back with forty scallop shells that had to be scrubbed with a nail brush before they'd go near the tables. Every place card sat in one, with a name in Dougie's untidy capitals, and by lunch the wind had got into half of them and sent the cards skittering across the grass.

The ring was the real trouble. Dougie had it in his waistcoat pocket until the vows, and then it wasn't there. Priya's nephew Oscar, who is six and believes he is a detective, lay flat on the tideline with his cheek on the wet sand for twenty minutes while the photographer shouted about the light. It was Oscar who found it, not in the sand at all but tucked inside the little scallop he'd been clutching since breakfast, because it was the nicest one and he wasn't giving it up. He held it out to Dougie without a word, the way you'd hand back a dropped glove.

Afterwards Priya's gran sat on an upturned crate and told everyone the sea always keeps a bit of a wedding back. Nobody argued. The band played Dancing Queen twice because the first time the speaker cut out, and somebody's uncle went over the marquee guy ropes, and none of it mattered.

I've posted you one of the shells, wrapped in tissue, with grit still caught in the ridges. Keep it on your windowsill where you'll see it. The sand never really comes out, and I've stopped wanting it to.

Love, Auntie Bev