Chapter 218 MY ANSWER, IN FRONT OF EVERYONE

Chapter 218 MY ANSWER, IN FRONT OF EVERYONE
POV: Brittany

I stood on the stage where my mother's dream had burned down thirty years ago, wearing the gown Sophia had finished with her last strength, holding the weight of two centuries of women who were never given this exact moment. I looked at David, poisoned and healed, betrayed by his own blood and rebuilt by choice, a man who had spent a year learning how to open every wall he was raised to build.

There was no calculation in the moment, none of the careful strategy that had defined so much of the past year, no map of consequences to weigh before answering. There was only the specific, complete certainty of a decision that had already made itself somewhere long before he'd finished asking.

I said yes before he even finished lowering the microphone.

The room erupted. Somewhere in the crowd I could hear Leo shouting something that was probably inappropriate for a formal event, his voice cutting clean through the applause, and I didn't care, because this was exactly the kind of chaos our family had earned the right to.

David laughed, genuine and unguarded, and pulled me close enough that the microphone caught nothing but the sound of the crowd around us. "I had a whole speech planned," he admitted against my ear. "I forgot every word of it the second you looked at me like that."

"I liked it better without the speech."

"You're going to make me say all of it eventually. I wrote it down."

"Later," I said, and kissed him properly, in front of four hundred reporters and buyers and industry figures who had come expecting a fashion launch and were leaving with a story that would run in every headline by morning.

Daisy's voice crackled through my abandoned earpiece somewhere on the stage floor, forgotten the moment David took the microphone, and I only heard it later, replayed from the venue's audio feed, her professional composure cracking entirely into something closer to delighted disbelief. "He did not just do that live. He did not just propose live, in front of every journalist in Houston, with zero warning to the PR team."

Elena was already crying openly in the front row, no attempt at composure left in her at all. Leo had climbed halfway out of his seat, one arm around Rosa, shouting something about finally getting to use the good champagne he'd apparently been saving in the studio fridge for exactly this occasion. Bianca stood with her hand pressed against her mouth, tears sliding freely, watching the sister she'd once betrayed find something this whole, this earned, this real.

My grandmother, seated near the front with Margaret's video call still glowing on the small tablet propped beside her, turned to the screen and said, loud enough that half the front row heard it, "Well, Margaret, looks like we'll need a second trip out here after all."

Margaret's laugh crackled faintly through the tablet's speaker, warm even at that distance.

The rest of the evening dissolved into celebration, the formal launch structure abandoning itself entirely to something closer to a party, buyers and press mingling with family in a way that would have been impossible even six months earlier, when every stranger in a room still felt like a potential threat.

The rest of the evening dissolved into celebration, the formal launch structure abandoning itself entirely to something closer to a party, buyers and press mingling with family in a way that would have been impossible even six months earlier, when every stranger in a room still felt like a potential threat.

I found David near the drinks table an hour later, his tie already loosened, one twin balanced against his shoulder while Elena managed the other nearby, and something about the ordinary domesticity of the scene against the backdrop of the night's enormity made me stop and simply watch him for a moment before crossing the room.

"You're staring," he said, without turning around.

"I'm allowed to stare. I just agreed to marry you twice in one lifetime."

"Technically the second one hasn't happened yet."

"Details," I said, and he laughed, the sound easy and unguarded in a way I still occasionally marveled at, considering everything it had taken to get him there.

Three months later, on a quiet morning with no cameras, no gala, no war left to fight, David and I married properly in the mansion's garden, the same one Elena and Tomas had remarried in, the twins asleep in matching phoenix-embroidered gowns Bianca had made specifically for the occasion.

The garden looked different this time, softer somehow, though I suspected the difference lived more in me than in the actual arrangement of flowers and chairs. My grandmother sat in the front row beside Margaret, who had made the trip from Louisiana against every reasonable medical objection, insisting she wasn't going to miss the second wedding after having watched the first proposal on a small screen from her care facility. Eleanor sat near them, David's mother, present and settled and entirely herself now, no longer hiding from a family that had finally learned how to hold her properly.

"You look like her," Margaret said quietly, when I stopped to greet her before the ceremony began, her hand finding mine with surprising strength. "More than you did the first time I met you. I think happiness does that. Clears a person's face until the resemblance finally shows through properly."

"I hope that's a compliment."

"It's the highest one I have left to give," Margaret said, and squeezed my hand once before letting me go.

William had come too, standing quietly near the back with a woman he introduced simply as a friend, and something in his posture that day looked lighter than I'd ever seen it, the specific ease of a man who had finally stopped waiting for the next accusation to land.

Elena stood as my witness, the same role I'd stood in for her not so long ago, and Leo stood as David's, both of us insisting on people who understood exactly what this marriage had cost us to earn rather than anyone chosen for appearance alone.

The ceremony was small and quiet, exactly as small and quiet as the first one had been enormous and strategic, and somewhere in the middle of the officiant's words I found myself thinking about the contract I'd signed a year and a half earlier, terrified and grieving, believing I was marrying a man who was old and broken to survive a betrayal I hadn't yet fully understood. That woman couldn't have imagined this garden, this ceremony, this version of David standing across from her with nothing left to hide.

I thought about the rain outside Adam's apartment, about the specific cold of that night, about how impossibly far away it felt now standing in warm afternoon light surrounded by people who had chosen, again and again, to stay. I thought about Clara, about Josephine, about every woman whose name had finally been spoken out loud after decades or centuries of enforced silence. I thought about Sophia, absent from this garden the way she'd been absent from the launch stage, and yet somehow, impossibly, present in every detail of it anyway, in the twins' embroidered gowns, in the phoenix brooch pinned discreetly to my own dress, in the specific fierce joy of a family that had finally learned how to hold onto each other properly.

David's hand found mine partway through the vows, steady, warm, exactly as certain as it had been every time it mattered most across the past eighteen months.

As the small ceremony ended, David leaned close and whispered the same three words from the sketchbook margin, in the order that had always been true for him, his voice low enough that only I could hear it over the soft rustle of the garden around us.

I whispered them back, in the order that had always been true for me.

Neither order had ever mattered less than it did in that exact moment, standing in the same garden where this family had finally, fully learned how to begin again.