Chapter 109: The Wedding

Amelia's POV

We got married on a Saturday in October, six months after we moved into the Brooklyn house, and it rained all morning and then stopped exactly twenty minutes before the ceremony like the weather had read the schedule and decided to cooperate at the last possible moment.

It wasn't a big wedding because neither of us wanted a big wedding and we'd talked about it once, a single conversation that lasted about fifteen minutes, and arrived at the same conclusion from different directions, that the marriage was the thing and the wedding was just the day, and the day should feel like us and not like a production.

So it was small, immediate family and close people only, in the garden of the Brooklyn house which had been transformed in the intervening months from the overgrown thing it had been when we'd first walked through it into something that was genuinely beautiful, not manicured, still slightly wild at the edges, which was right, which was how we both liked things.

Elena cried from the moment she walked outside and didn't really stop and wasn't embarrassed about it even once, which was so Elena it physically ached in the best way.

Daniel stood beside her and handed her tissues and looked slightly overwhelmed himself, the way he often looked at family events still, like someone who was used to standing slightly outside things and was still adjusting to being inside them, and I'd caught him smiling to himself at one point when he thought nobody was watching and the sight of it had done something to my chest that I hadn't had words for.

Thomas sat in the second row and didn't say much and didn't need to, and I'd caught him looking at the girls in their little dresses that Elena had chosen and arguing about with me for three weeks and the look on his face when he watched them was the closest thing to peace I'd ever seen there, and I thought about my mother and about what she would have thought of all of it and decided she would have thought it was too many flowers but the garden was nice.

Grayson stood at the end of the aisle we'd made between two rows of chairs and he was wearing a suit that fit the way his suits always fit and his hands were loose at his sides and he was looking at me and only me the moment I came through the back door of the house with Elena behind me, and the look on his face was not the composed controlled thing I'd spent months learning to read underneath, it was just open, completely open, the same look he'd had when he'd held the girls for the first time, and I walked toward him and felt the rightness of it settle through me like something that had been waiting a long time to arrive.

The ceremony was short and honest and we'd written our own vows which I'd been nervous about and which turned out fine because when you've been through what we'd been through together the words weren't actually that hard to find, they were just true things said out loud, and I said mine and he said his and the garden was very quiet while we did and then it wasn't, and Elena was crying properly by this point and Clara chose that exact moment to make a very loud and completely unbothered sound from the front row that broke the solemnity just enough to make everyone laugh and then go back to it.

We had lunch in the garden and Daniel and Grayson had a conversation I couldn't hear from across the table but that seemed to go well based on the fact that they were both almost smiling by the end of it, and Thomas had a brief exchange with Marcus of all people that I would have given anything to hear the content of, and Elena gave a speech that was funny and generous and made me cry in the middle of it and at the end she said "Mom would have been so difficult about everything today and it would have been perfect and I miss her" and sat back down and that was the most honest thing said all day.

Grayson didn't give a speech because he wasn't a speech person and I knew that and had told him in advance that he didn't need to, but when everyone was done and the afternoon was settling into the easier slower pace of people who'd eaten well and were comfortable with each other, he leaned over and said quietly against my ear "I've been trying to think of the right way to say this all day and I've decided there isn't one, so I'm just going to say that everything that happened before this was worth it because it got us here, and I wouldn't take any of it back, not even the terrible parts, because the terrible parts are how I know what this is worth," and I turned to look at him and he was looking at me steadily the way he always looked at me when he meant something completely, and I said "me too" because it was true and it was enough.

The girls fell asleep in their grandmother's— in Elena's, in Thomas's arms at different points in the afternoon, and at one point all three of them were on the blanket in the garden, Sarah asleep against Thomas's side and Clara on her back looking at the sky making her thinking sounds, and Thomas was very still and looking at nothing in particular and I watched him from the doorway and thought about the letter my mother had written him that she'd never sent that had said she forgave him, and I thought maybe forgiveness wasn't always something you said out loud, maybe sometimes it was just a Saturday in October with the rain stopped and the garden finally looking like something and your daughters asleep in the arms of the complicated man who had started all of this, and the fact that everybody was okay.

Grayson found me in the doorway and stood beside me and looked at the same scene and said "you're thinking loudly again."

"I know," I said.

"What about," he said.

"About how strange it is that it all worked out," I said.

He considered that for a moment and then said "I don't think it's strange" and I looked at him and he said "I think we worked very hard for it to work out and things that get worked for usually do eventually."

"That's very you," I said.

"I know," he said, and he was almost smiling.

We went back inside to our guests and our daughters and our garden in October and our new house that was becoming a home room by room, day by day, and the afternoon stretched out golden and unhurried ahead of us and I thought I had never in my life felt so entirely, undefensively glad to be exactly where I was.