Chapter 315: Chapter 317: I now pronounce you husband and wife
ARIA’S POV
She’d thought she would be nervous standing here.
She’d prepared for nervous...had braced for it on the walk down the path, had told herself she was allowed to feel it, that feeling it didn’t mean anything except that this mattered.
She wasn’t nervous.
She was...present. Completely, entirely present in a way she almost never was, in a way that her brain which was always running three things simultaneously had never quite managed. Just here. Just this. Just him in front of her with his whole face showing everything he felt and sixty people behind her and peonies and a cellist and the east garden in the morning light.
The celebrant spoke.
She heard the words and felt them land...not abstractly, not as ceremonial language, but actually. The weight of them. What it meant to say them out loud in front of the people who knew the whole story.
Damien said his vows first.
She’d known he’d written them himself. She’d told him she was writing her own and he’d said he would too and she’d wondered what he’d say. Whether he’d find the words for it....this man who kept things contained, who had spent his whole life keeping things contained.
He found the words.
"I knew your name before you told it to me," he said. "I knew your history. I knew why you came and what you needed and what you were willing to do for the people you loved." He held her gaze. "And I watched you....every day, in every small moment....be more than all of that. Be someone I had no preparation for." He paused. "I’ve spent my life building things that last. I’m not good at needing things. I’m not good at letting things matter more than I can manage." Another pause. "You are the one thing I’ve never been able to manage. And I’ve stopped wanting to." He held her gaze. "You are my home. Whatever comes, wherever we are, whatever we’re facing....you are where I’m from. And I will spend every year we have making sure you know that."
She was not going to cry.
She was absolutely going to cry.
She pressed her lips together hard.
She breathed.
Then she said her vows.
"I came here with a false name and a plan that was never going to work the way I thought it would," she said. "I came for one thing and I found everything else." She looked at him. "I found a house that became home. I found people I didn’t know I needed. And I found you infuriating and certain and completely unable to let anything go unchallenged,,,,," A small sound from someone in the chairs. ".....who looked at me like you were reading something I hadn’t written yet." She paused. "And then you waited. For me to be ready. For me to choose." She held his gaze. "I choose you. With everything I know about who you are and what your life costs and what loving you requires." A pause. "I choose you every single day. Easily and completely." She paused one more time. "You are the best thing I never planned for."
The garden was very quiet.
The celebrant said the words about rings.
They exchanged them, her ring to him, simple and chosen together, and his hand was steady when she put it on even though nothing else about him looked steady.
"I now pronounce you husband and wife," the celebrant said.
Damien looked at her.
"Finally," he said quietly.
She laughed.
He kissed her.
The garden came apart completely.
Not dramatically....just the specific warm eruption of sixty people who had been holding something in releasing it all at once. She heard it without quite seeing it because she was still looking at him and he was still looking at her and the world was doing what it did outside the two of them.
Then she looked.
Mei in the front row with her hands pressed together in front of her face and her eyes closed and Alexander beside her with his arm around her and his face entirely open in the way she’d seen it only once before.....in a garden at night when she’d told him she chose him every day.
Richard.
She looked at Richard.
He was looking at his hands in his lap.
His jaw was set in the particular way of a man exercising considerable self-control.
She knew that jaw.
She’d seen it on Damien a hundred times.
She thought about Eleanor. About forty three years. About a ring on a desk.
She held Damien’s hand and looked at his grandfather and felt something in her chest that was too large for the moment to contain and that she let exist anyway.
Lucy was in the third row.
She caught Aria’s eye and did something with her face that was not crying.
It was definitely crying.
Aria looked at Marcus.
Marcus was not crying.
Marcus was looking at the garden wall with the focused attention of a man cataloguing the structural integrity of the stonework.
She squeezed Damien’s hand.
He squeezed back.
They turned to face the garden....their garden, their people, their morning and the cellist moved into something lighter and the chairs began to empty and the day began properly.
***
DAMIEN’S POV
Later.
When the formal part was done and the reception had moved to the long tables in the west garden and the food was happening and the light was going gold and everyone was talking at once the way people talked when they were genuinely happy and not performing it....
He found a moment.
He stepped back from a conversation with one of his board members and looked at the garden.
Aria was across the space with her mother and Lucy, the three of them with their heads together over something, Aria laughing at whatever Lucy had said. Alexander was beside Richard at the far table and they appeared to be in an actual conversation, not the wary parallel proximity they usually maintained but actually talking, leaning slightly toward each other the way people leaned when they were genuinely interested.
Marcus appeared beside him.
He looked at the same scene.
"She said you forgot to breathe," Marcus said.
"Yes."
"I told her you did that."
"I know."
"You’re welcome."
Damien looked at him.
Marcus was looking at the garden with the neutral expression he deployed for everything.
"Thank you," Damien said. "Marcus." He held his gaze when Marcus turned to look at him. "For all of it. The forty seven pages. The chain. Everything before that." He paused. "All of it."
Marcus held his gaze.
"She’s good," Marcus said. Simply. The way he said things that mattered.....without ornamentation, just the fact of it. "You did well."
"She did well," Damien said. "I just....waited."
"You did more than wait."
"Not as much as she did."
Marcus looked at the garden.
"No," he said. "But enough."
He walked away.
Damien looked at his wife across the garden.
His wife.
She looked up at that moment....from whatever Lucy was saying, through the garden, directly at him....and found him immediately the way she always found him in rooms, the specific directness of it, the way it landed.
She raised her glass slightly.
He raised his.
She smiled and went back to Lucy.
He looked at the east garden. The arch still standing. The peonies along the chairs. The path she’d walked down two hours ago with flowers in her hair.
He thought about a girl with a false name and a desperate plan.
He thought about everything it had built into.
He thought about the word he’d said to her when she reached him at the arch.
Finally.
Yes, he thought.
Finally.
