Chapter 124 The Wedding Day

Chapter 124 The Wedding Day
He looked at Melissa over Lily's head, and she looked back. Her eyes were bright. 

He reached across Lily, who was now adding Starlight to the list with deep concentration, and found Melissa's hand.

She turned her palm and held his.

Lily kept writing.

Later, after Lily had been persuaded to put the notebook away and had eaten dinner and had told William at bedtime that she was going to be an excellent big sister, and had specific ideas about how the baby's room should be decorated.

After all of that, William and Melissa sat on the back porch.

He reached over and placed his hand on her stomach, gently and carefully. The way you place your hand on something that matters.

She looked down at his hand. She put her hand over his.

They sat in the garden where he had proposed, where so many things had turned, where the fountain ran steadily as it always had through every version of their lives.

Upstairs, Lily opened her notebook one more time in the dark and added one final name to the list. In the biggest letters yet.

Lily Junior.

She capped her pen. Nodded once and went to sleep completely satisfied.
….

The garden had never looked like this.

Melissa stood at the upstairs window of the mansion and looked down at it, white chairs in careful rows across the lawn, a canopy of pale flowers arching over the spot by the fountain. 

String lights threaded through the trees, waiting for evening, though the morning sun made them barely visible yet.

Her mother's chair sat empty in the front row.

Mrs. Rose had insisted on it. A single white chair with a small bouquet tied to the back, left intentionally unoccupied.

Melissa pressed her palm flat against the window glass and let herself feel all of it for one private moment before the day swept her up entirely.

Downstairs, the house was chaos in its most joyful form.

Dominique was directing the hair and makeup team like a woman running a military operation. 

Ms. Voss had arrived an hour early, inspecting the seating chart, and quietly fixed two placement errors before anyone noticed there had been errors at all. 

Lily was already dressed.

A Pale gold dress to match the lettering on the store sign, delivered with the same unmovable certainty she brought to all her decisions. She stood in front of the hallway mirror, turning in small circles, watching the skirt move.

"I am the flower girl," she informed her reflection. "This is the most important job."

"It's a very important job," Melissa agreed, adjusting one of Lily's braids.

"I practiced my walk, mama"

"I saw you practicing your walk," Melissa answered.

Melissa pressed her lips together.

"Dada said weddings should have one dramatic moment that isn't bad," Lily said. "I'm going to have a good dramatic moment."

Melissa crouched down and kissed her forehead, mostly to hide the fact that her eyes had gone hot and bright without warning.

"You already are, sweetheart," she said.

William was at the far end of the house, in the room that had once been his father's study, standing in front of the mirror while his tailor made a final adjustment to his coat.

Davies knocked once and entered without waiting for a response, a habit they had developed over the years.

"You look terrified," Davies said.

"I am not terrified."

"You're holding your cufflink as if it might attack you."

William looked down and set the cufflink on the dresser. 

"I'm not terrified of marrying her; it's just that I have never been more certain of anything in my life."

"Then what is it?"

William was quiet for a moment.

"There's a guard at the front gate, holding a woman who wants to get in."

Davies' expression changed instantly. "Scarlet."

"She came alone." William turned from the mirror. 

"She asked the guard to relay one thing. He paused. "She wants five minutes to speak to me before Melissa walks down that aisle."

Davies' jaw tightened. "You don't owe her five minutes. Not after the gate and after everything."

"I know what I owe her," William said quietly. "Nothing, that's not why I'm considering it."

"Then why?"

William looked toward the window. Through it, faintly, he could see the very edge of the garden: white chairs, pale flowers, and the fountain catching morning light.

"Because today is the day I become someone's husband," he said. "And someone's father, twice over, soon. I don't want to walk into that with a closed door I never gave a chance to open honestly." 

He met Davies' eyes. "I'm doing it so that whatever happens next, I know I did everything I could without compromising what matters."

Davies studied him for a long moment.

"Five minutes," he said finally. "A supervised meeting; I shall stand at the door. If she says one wrong word, she's gone, and she does not come back ever."

William nodded slowly.

"Five minutes," he agreed.

Scarlet stood in the small sitting room just off the entrance hall, a security guard positioned at the door, her hands folded in front of her with a stillness that looked almost like prayer.

She had dressed carefully, in a way William had rarely seen from her. Pale grey. No jewelry beyond a single string of pearls that had belonged to his grandmother.

She looked, for the first time in his memory, smaller than the room around her.

He stood in the doorway.

"Five minutes, and Davies stays at the door." He said.

"I understand," she said.

He stepped in.

She looked at him for a long moment.

"I'm not here to ask for a seat at this wedding," she said. "I know I have no right to one. I'm not here to argue about the gate, or the order, or anything that happened between us." 

Her hands tightened slightly around each other. "I'm here because I have spent the last several weeks doing something I have spent my entire life avoiding."

"What's that?"

"Sitting with myself," she said. "Without an agenda or a calculation running underneath it." Her voice was unsteady, which he had also never heard from her. 

"It is the hardest thing I have ever done, William. Harder than anything in that boardroom ever was."

William was silent.

"I am not going to stand here and tell you I've changed completely; I don't think people change completely. I think, if they're fortunate, they change in pieces, slowly, and some pieces never change at all." 

She looked at him directly. "But I came here today to say two things, and then I will leave, and you will never have to see me again unless you choose to."

"Go ahead." He said.

"I am really sorry," she said. “I built you to survive a world I was terrified of losing my place in. I taught you that love had conditions because that was the only love I knew how to give. I am sorry for what that cost you. I am sorry for what it nearly cost Melissa and that little girl."