Chapter 132 The Part Where We Stay

Chapter 132 The Part Where We Stay
Harper's POV,

The reception was in the same building, the ceremony space transformed while we'd been taking photographs in the courtyard into something warmer and looser; round tables replacing the ceremony chairs, candles lit, the bar open, the particular energy shift that happens when the formal part of a day gives way to the part where people are allowed to just be happy without structure.

Rose had found a bread roll.

I didn't know where she'd gotten it. She hadn't been near the bread. And yet there she was, sitting in Crew's lap at our table, working through a dinner roll with the focused satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment.

"Where did she get that?" I said.

"I genuinely don't know," Crew said. "One minute she didn't have it. Then she did."

"Rose, where did you get the bread?"

She looked at me. Took another bite. Said nothing.

"She's not going to tell you," Crew said.

"Rose."

"It's good bread," she said finally, which was not an answer to my question but was clearly the only answer I was going to get.

I let it go.

The room was full and warm and loud in the right way; the noise of people who were genuinely glad to be somewhere rather than performing gladness. Simone's family occupied two full tables and generated approximately forty percent of the total volume, which felt right. Maya's colleagues from the Canucks PR office were there, a group of people who'd watched Maya build something serious and professional over years and were apparently delighted to discover she was also capable of crying through her own vows.

Maya herself was moving through the room with Simone, the two of them making their way from table to table with the particular glow of people who had just done something irreversible and were completely at peace with it. Every time I caught Maya's eye she looked like someone who had put down something heavy and was still getting used to walking without it.

Patricia the coordinator appeared at our table.

"Speeches in twenty minutes," she said. "Mr. Lawson, you're second. After Simone's sister."

Crew nodded and Patricia moved on.

I looked at him. "You ready?"

"Not yet."

"You've been preparing for weeks."

"Preparing and ready are different things." He shifted Rose on his lap. She'd finished the bread and was now examining a flower from the centerpiece with the interest of someone considering whether to dismantle it. "Harper, I've given post-game press conferences to rooms full of hostile journalists. I've never given a wedding speech."

"It's not that different."

"It's completely different. Nobody at a press conference is crying already when I start talking."

"That's fair." I put my hand on his arm. "You'll be fine. Just say what you mean."

"What if what I mean makes me cry in front of everyone?"

"Then you cry in front of everyone. This is a wedding. Crying is the whole point."

He looked at me for a moment.

"When did you get so calm about public emotion?" he said.

"I've been crying in public for the past three years. I've made peace with it."

Rose put the flower back in the centerpiece, apparently having decided against dismantling, and climbed off Crew's lap with the decisive energy of someone who had somewhere to be. She made her way toward Simone's family two tables over, drawn by the noise and warmth the way she was always drawn toward the loudest most welcoming corner of any room.

I watched her go.

"She's going to be fine over there," Crew said.

"I know." Janine from the Oladipo table had already spotted her and was making the face adults made when Rose was incoming — the braced delighted expression of someone who knew they were about to be thoroughly charmed and was helpless against it. "She has good instincts about people."

"She gets that from you," Crew said.

………

Simone's sister spoke first.

She was funny and warm and clearly knew Simone in the specific way of someone who'd grown up alongside her — the stories she told were the kind that revealed character rather than just events. She talked about Simone at fifteen deciding she was going to learn to cook properly and methodically working through a cookbook for an entire summer. About Simone reorganizing the family bookshelf by color and then by genre and then by publication date before settling on author alphabetically. About Simone calling her at midnight the first time she realized she was in love with Maya, voice completely steady, saying; “I think something important just happened.”

Maya was already crying again before the speech was halfway through.

Then Simone's sister raised her glass and sat down and Patricia nodded at Crew and he stood up.

The room settled.

He didn't have notes. He'd written things down and then left the paper at home deliberately, he'd told me, because he didn't want to read at people. He wanted to talk to them.

He looked at Maya first.

"Maya Park," he said. "I've known you for — a while now." A beat. "Long enough to know that you are the most strategically minded person I've ever met who also genuinely, completely, sometimes aggressively cares about the people around her."

A few laughs. Maya's expression was doing something complicated.

"When Harper and I first started — whatever we were starting — you were the architecture of it. You built the thing and handed us the keys and trusted us not to drive it into a wall." He paused. "We drove it into several walls."

More laughter.

"But you never stopped believing it was worth fixing. Even when the evidence was genuinely not in your favor. Even when the whole thing was on fire and I was in a treatment facility and Harper was fighting a legal battle that would have broken most people…. you stayed. You kept showing up. You kept telling her she deserved better and that better was possible." He stopped. "You were right. Obviously. You're almost always right, which I say with complete sincerity and only mild resentment."

Maya laughed through tears.

Crew looked at Simone.

"And Simone — I don't know you as well as I know Maya. But I know what it looks like when someone is loved properly. I know what it does to a person when someone sees them clearly and stays anyway." He glanced at me briefly, just for a second. "Maya is better because of you. More herself. Less afraid of being all of what she is." He raised his glass. "Thank you for loving her the way she deserves to be loved. And thank you for putting up with the voice notes at six in the morning. That alone qualifies you for sainthood."

The room laughed properly this time.

"To Maya and Simone," Crew said. "Who figured out the most important thing: that love isn't something that happens to you. It's something you choose. Every day. In all the ordinary moments."

He sat down.

The room was still for just a beat — the specific stillness that follows something that landed the way it was supposed to — and then the applause came, full and genuine.

Maya was not ugly crying.

She was beautifully, completely, unashamedly crying, and Simone had her hand and was looking at her with the expression she'd worn at the altar — “of course, there you are” — and Maya's mother in the corner had given up entirely on composure and wasn't even trying anymore.

I leaned into Crew's shoulder.

"You made her ugly cry," I said quietly.

"You said crying was the whole point."

"I did say that."

"So I succeeded."

"You absolutely did." I tilted my head up and kissed his jaw. "That was perfect. You were perfect."

He made a sound that meant he wasn't going to argue but wasn't going to agree out loud either, which was as close to accepting a compliment as Crew Lawson ever got.

Across the room Rose had fully integrated herself into Simone's family and was sitting on someone's grandmother's lap eating what appe
ared to be another bread roll.

Still no idea where she was getting them.

Some mysteries, I decided, were better left unsolved.