After her fiancé, Lu Yanshen, dies in a car accident, Yan Wanqing develops a peculiar “visual hallucination”: she keeps seeing herself wearing the wedding dress she never got to put on. Unable to let go of her love, she opens a bridal shop in the old alley where they once made a promise, specializing in “weddings that could never take place.”
Over twelve years, she witnesses more than three hundred “unwitnessed weddings”: a young man arranging a Republican-era wedding portrait for his grandparents; a grandmother putting a veil on for the lover she lost in the line of duty; the family of a girl with leukemia using an urn as the “groom”; an elderly person with Alzheimer's arranging a wedding ceremony for herself... She writes each story in her diary, piecing together her own forever-incomplete ceremony from fragments of other people's regrets.
Then she discovers the secret behind Lu Yanshen's last phone call before the accident, and realizes that their parting in the rain may have had more to it than she knew. As the truth comes undone, sequin by sequin, on the wedding dress, Yan Wanqing must choose: keep living in her memories, wearing that “invisible wedding dress,” or undo the stitches she has sewn for twelve years and finally let the wound see the light.
This is a long wedding with the dead, and the only one who can say “I do” is the one still alive.
