Chapter 207 ELENA'S QUIET WEDDING

Chapter 207 ELENA'S QUIET WEDDING
POV: Elena

"It's really not necessary," I told Brittany for what had to be the fifth time that week, standing in the garden. At the same time, a small crew of David's staff strung lights between the trees like this was a wedding for someone important instead of two people who'd already been married once, quietly, thirty years too late for a proper ceremony either time.

"It's completely necessary," Brittany said, not looking up from the seating chart she was scribbling on a clipboard, which was itself absurd, because there were maybe twenty people invited and half of them lived in the mansion already.

"Brittany."

"Elena."

"You have two infant daughters and a foundation launching in weeks. You do not have time to be planning a garden wedding for your housekeeper."

She finally looked up. "You're not my housekeeper. You're family. And family gets a proper wedding when they've waited eleven years for it."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I let her win, the way I'd learned to let her win most arguments over the past year, because underneath her stubbornness was always something generous enough that fighting it too hard felt like refusing a gift out of pride alone.

Tomas stood near the garden's edge, uncomfortable in a suit he hadn't worn in over a decade, fidgeting with his collar the way he used to fidget before every one of our secret visits, the specific nervousness of a man who had spent eleven years disappearing carefully and still hadn't fully adjusted to being visible again.

"You look ridiculous," I told him, walking over.

"You look beautiful," he said, "and I feel ridiculous, so I suppose we're both right."

"You've faced worse than a garden full of family."

"I've faced worse than a garden full of family who all know exactly how much time I spent hiding from them," he said. "This is a different kind of hard."

I took his hand. "It's the good kind of hard."

The ceremony itself was small, exactly as small as Tomas and I had wanted, despite Brittany's insistence on lights, flowers, and a small string quartet she'd hired against my direct instructions. A local officiant David's team vetted three times over said the words. Tomas cried, which surprised no one who'd watched him hold himself together through eleven years of quiet fear, and I did not cry, because someone in that garden needed to keep their composure, and thirty years of practice had made me very good at it.

Sophia insisted on attending in person, against her doctor's continued and increasingly frustrated objections, seated in a chair positioned exactly where she could see everything without needing to strain. She'd looked frailer every week since the trial ended, something in her that seemed to be quietly, deliberately slowing, though she never once complained about it out loud.

"You didn't have to come," I told her before the ceremony started, kneeling beside her chair.

"I absolutely had to come," she said. "I've watched this family survive things that should have destroyed it a dozen times over. I intend to watch it celebrate something too, while I still can."

When the small ceremony ended, she was the first to embrace me, and I felt her hold on longer than her usual composure typically allowed, longer than I'd ever known her to hold anything, her thin arms surprisingly strong around my shoulders.

"Congratulations, Elena," she said against my ear. "You waited longer than any of us should have asked you to."

"You didn't ask me to wait. I chose it."

"You chose it to protect this family," Sophia said, pulling back to look at me. "That's not the same as it being fair to you."

Brittany caught me by the drinks table not long after, still in her simple dress, no gown, no gala armor, just herself.

"You survived the seating chart," I told her.

"Barely. Your grandmother argued for twenty minutes about not sitting near the string quartet because she said the cellist looked at her funny."

"She thinks everyone looks at her funny."

"She's not wrong most of the time," Brittany said, and we both laughed, easy in a way conversations between us had only recently become.

David found her a moment later, one twin balanced against his shoulder, and Brittany's whole posture shifted toward him the way it always did now, unconsciously, as her body had simply decided he was the direction it turned.

"You two look happy," I said.

"We are," Brittany said, and meant it plainly, without performance, the way she'd learned to mean most things now.

The party wound down slowly, the way small gatherings do when nobody's in a rush to leave, David and Brittany dancing badly to the quartet's slower songs, Leo and Daisy arguing quietly by the food table about something that made Daisy laugh despite clearly trying not to, Grandmother Redman holding court from a garden bench with an audience of exactly one very patient security guard.

Tomas found me near the edge of it all, slipping his hand into mine without a word, and we stood together watching the lights flicker in the trees, thirty years of separation finally, fully behind us.

"I keep waiting to wake up," he said quietly.

"From what?"

"This. All of it. Eleven years of watching from a distance, and now I'm standing in a garden that isn't mine, at a wedding that's officially mine, surrounded by people who know exactly who I am and don't seem to mind."

"They don't mind," I said. "They understand what you did, and why."

"Understanding isn't the same as forgiving."

"With this family," I said, "it usually turns out to be close enough in the end, once everyone finally stops pretending they can carry the whole thing alone."

That evening, after the last of the celebration wound down and most of the family had drifted inside, Sophia asked to speak with me privately, and there was something in her voice that made my stomach tighten with a familiar, unwelcome dread I recognized from thirty years of watching this family's hardest conversations happen in quiet corners like this one.

"Walk with me," she said, and I helped her chair to the far end of the garden, away from the last of the lights, past the roses Tomas had started tending again now that he was allowed to be seen doing it, past the bench where Grandmother Redman had finally released her captive audience for the night.

"You're worrying me," I told her, feeling the garden go quieter around us, or maybe it was just that everything else had stopped mattering as much as whatever she was about to say.

"I need you to promise me something, Elena," she said, taking my hand in both of hers. Her grip was weaker than it used to be, but it was still firm, still hers, still the grip of a woman who had spent eighty years refusing to let go of the things that mattered.

"Anything."

"When the time comes." She paused, and I watched her choose her next words with the specific care she gave everything important. "And I think it's coming sooner than any of us are ready for."

"Sophia, don't."

"Let me finish." Her voice was gentle but firm, the tone that had ended arguments in this family for eighty years. "I need you to make sure Brittany doesn't try to hold this whole thing together by herself. She will try. It's in her nature, the same way it was in Clara's, the same way it's apparently in mine. I need you to promise you'll help her let people in, the way you finally let Tomas back in tonight, after eleven years of insisting you could carry it alone."

I felt my throat tighten. "I promise."

"Say it properly."

"I promise you, Sophia. I'll help her let people in."

Her grip tightened, and something in her face shifted, the specific weight of a woman preparing to hand over something heavier than the first promise.

"Promise me that specifically," she said, "before I ask you the harder thing."