Chapter 314: Chapter 316: The Wedding
MARCUS’S POV
He’d been standing next to Damien for forty minutes.
In that time Damien had straightened his cuffs three times, looked at his watch twice, and had a conversation with Richard that Marcus couldn’t hear but that had ended with Richard putting one hand briefly on Damien’s shoulder in the way he did approximately once a decade.
The chairs were full.
Not many....sixty people, maybe less. The guest list that Damien had reduced three times in the meeting with Celeste and that was exactly right for the east garden, exactly right for the morning, exactly right for two people who had always kept the things that mattered most close and private.
Richard was in the front row.
Alexander beside him, which had required a brief negotiation about seating that Marcus had mediated and that he was never going to mention to anyone. They’d arrived at a arrangement that satisfied both of them which meant neither was entirely happy and both could live with it.
Mei’s chair was empty.
She was inside with Aria.
The cellist was playing something that Marcus couldn’t have named but that had the specific quality Aria had asked for....like someone existing in a space rather than performing in it. It moved through the garden quietly and everyone sat inside it and waited.
Damien was looking at the path.
He’d been looking at the path since he’d taken his place. The white chairs on either side. The peonies at the end of every row....soft and unannounced, exactly as Celeste had promised. The arch at the front where they were standing, threaded through with the same flowers, the morning light doing something extraordinary with all of it.
"Damien," Marcus said quietly.
"I know," Damien said.
"You’re doing the jaw thing."
"I’m not doing anything."
"You’re doing the jaw thing you do when you’re containing something." Marcus kept his voice low. "Stop containing it. There’s nobody here you need to contain it for."
Damien looked at him.
Marcus looked back.
After a moment Damien looked back at the path.
The music shifted.
Something in it changed....not dramatically, just a subtle movement into something slightly fuller, slightly more present, the way music changed when it was telling you something was about to happen.
Everyone in the chairs felt it.
They turned.
****
RICHARD’S POV
He heard her before he saw her.
The particular quality of the garden changing....the collective held breath of sixty people realising simultaneously that she was there. He turned with everyone else.
She was at the entrance to the garden with Mei beside her.
He looked at her for a moment.
Then he looked at Damien.
Damien had gone completely still.
Not the controlled stillness he maintained in boardrooms and negotiations and every professional situation Richard had watched him navigate for thirty years. The other kind. The kind that happened when the body forgot to do anything except register what the eyes were seeing.
Richard had seen that stillness once before.
He’d seen it on his own face, in a mirror, at a garden party in 1974 when he’d turned and seen Eleanor across a lawn.
He looked back at Aria.
She was wearing something simple....of course she was. Ivory, clean lines, nothing that needed to announce itself because she didn’t need anything to announce itself. Her hair was up with small flowers in it that he recognised as the ones Eleanor had grown along the south wall.
He looked at those flowers for a moment.
He felt Mei sit down beside him.
He didn’t look at Mei. He looked at his hands in his lap.
He was not going to do anything embarrassing.
He was seventy three years old.
He breathed.
****
ALEXANDER’S POV
He had not expected this.
He’d expected to feel complicated things. He’d been preparing for complicated things....the particular mixture of pride and grief and the specific ache of twenty four years of missing that he’d been learning to carry without letting it flatten everything else.
He’d prepared for complicated.
He hadn’t prepared for simple.
She came through the entrance to the garden and he looked at his daughter....his daughter, the word still new enough to feel extraordinary every time.....and felt something that wasn’t complicated at all.
Just....love.
Simple and complete and entirely uncomplicated.
She was looking at the path ahead of her. Then she looked at the chairs, at the people in them, and her eyes moved through the garden with the particular attention he’d come to know as specifically hers. Filing everything. Seeing everything.
Her eyes found him.
He held her gaze.
She smiled.
Not the composed version. The real one....surprised out of her by the moment, arriving before she could stop it, the one he’d been told about and that was exactly as described and that undid him completely.
He smiled back.
He couldn’t have stopped it.
He looked at Richard beside him.
Richard was looking at his hands.
Alexander said nothing.
He looked back at his daughter walking toward the man who loved her.
He breathed.
***
DAMIEN’S POV
He forgot to breathe.
He knew he’d forgotten because Marcus put a hand briefly on his arm and said very quietly....one word, just one....breathe.....and he understood from the word that he’d been standing there not doing it.
He breathed.
It didn’t help.
She was walking toward him down the path between the chairs and the peonies and the morning light and she was the most.....she was....he had words for most things. He’d built a life on having words for things, on being able to assess and articulate and act. He didn’t have words for this.
He watched her walk.
She was looking at him.
He understood from the way she was looking at him that she could see everything on his face. He wasn’t containing anything. He’d stopped containing things approximately fifteen seconds ago and now his entire face was doing whatever it was doing and sixty people could probably see it and he found, standing here watching her walk toward him, that he did not care at all.
She reached him.
She stopped.
She looked up at him.
She said very quietly, just for him: "You forgot to breathe."
"Marcus told you."
"Your face told me." She looked at him steadily. "Are you okay."
"No," he said.
She looked at him.
"I mean yes," he said. "I mean...." He stopped. He looked at her face. At the flowers in her hair. At the ring on her hand that had sat in a drawer for twenty years. "I mean I’ve never been less okay and more okay simultaneously in my entire life."
Something moved across her face.
"Hi," she said softly.
"Hi," he said.
Behind them the celebrant said something about gathering together and beginning and the garden settled into the specific quality of attention that happened when sixty people decided simultaneously that they were going to pay attention to every single second of what was about to happen.
Damien didn’t look at the celebrant.
He looked at Aria.
She looked at him.
