Chapter 317: Chapter 319: The Wedding Speech
Aria’s throat was doing something she was managing carefully.
"She gets her stubbornness from me," Alexander said. "Her mother would like me to note that she disagrees with this." He glanced at Mei. "Her mother is wrong." A small laugh around the table. "She gets her certainty from her mother. She gets her courage from herself." He paused. "I can’t take credit for any of the best parts of her. But I intend to spend the rest of my life being grateful that she let me show up anyway."
He looked at Damien.
"You love her correctly," he said. Simply. "That’s the only thing I was ever going to ask of anyone." He held Damien’s gaze. "You love her correctly."
He looked back at Aria.
"I’m proud of you," he said. "Not for surviving everything. For choosing joy anyway." He raised his glass. "To my daughter. The best thing I spent twenty four years looking for without knowing what I was looking for."
The table was very quiet.
Then Richard said from the end: "Hear hear."
Which from Richard, Aria had come to understand, was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
She was crying.
She had completely stopped pretending she wasn’t crying.
Damien’s hand tightened on hers under the table.
She looked at him.
He looked back.
She mouthed: I’m fine.
He mouthed: I know.
Mei stood up third.
She didn’t have notes.
Of course she didn’t have notes....Mei Chen had never needed notes for anything in her life. She stood with her glass and looked at her daughter and the table was already completely silent before she’d said a word.
"When Aria was four years old," Mei said, "she sat at our kitchen table and told me she was going to learn how to fix people." She paused. "She said it the way she said everything at four....like she’d already decided and was simply informing me of the conclusion." She smiled. "I believed her immediately. I’ve always believed her immediately. That’s the thing about Aria. She says what she means and she does what she says and she has never once in her life needed anyone’s permission to know her own mind."
She looked at Damien.
"She didn’t need my permission to love you," Mei said. "She didn’t ask for it. She wouldn’t have accepted it if I’d tried to withhold it." She paused. "But she wanted it. She cared what I thought. And I want you to know that what I thought....from the beginning, from the moment I understood who you were to her....was that you saw her." She held his gaze. "Not the version of her she shows the world. Not the capable, competent, invulnerable version." She paused. "The real one. The one who fixed things because she couldn’t bear to leave them broken. The one who carried everything alone because she didn’t know how to put it down." She paused. "You taught her how to put it down. And that is not a small thing."
She looked at Aria.
"My girl," she said softly. "You came into my life and made everything worth it. Every hard year. Every difficult thing." She stopped. "You are the best thing I ever did." She raised her glass. "And he is the best thing you ever found." She paused. "Even if you found him by breaking into his house."
The table erupted.
Aria laughed through her tears and Damien made a sound beside her that was definitely a laugh and Richard at the end of the table looked at his glass with the expression of a man who was absolutely not smiling.
"To Aria and Damien," Mei said. "May every year be better than the last."
Julian stood up fourth.
Nobody had asked him to speak.
He stood up anyway, which was entirely Julian, and the table looked at him with the mix of amusement and expectation that Julian Pierce reliably generated in every room he walked into.
He looked slightly less rumpled than he had an hour ago.
He’d had two glasses of wine and a full plate of Mrs Abel’s food and the specific reinflation of a man who had been travelling for twenty two hours and had finally stopped moving.
"I wasn’t supposed to speak," he said. "I wasn’t even supposed to be here, technically, because my London connection....."
"We know about the connection," Damien said.
"I’m providing context," Julian said. He looked at the table. "I’ve known Damien Blackwood since we were sixteen years old. We met because he told me my business plan was structurally flawed and I told him he was structurally flawed and somehow that became a friendship." A sound around the table. "In those years I have watched him build something extraordinary. I have also watched him be, on occasion, the most difficult human being I have ever encountered." He paused. "And I say that with complete love."
He looked at Aria.
"I met Aria before I knew who she was to him," he said. "And I want to be honest about something." He paused. "When I first met her I thought....this woman is too good for this situation. I thought she was too warm and too real and too....herself for the world she’d walked into." He paused. "I was wrong." He looked at Damien. "Not about her. About the situation." He paused. "Because the situation turned out to be you. And you turned out to be...." He stopped. "Different. Since her. In ways I didn’t think were possible."
He looked back at Aria.
"You did something I spent six years thinking was impossible," he said. "You made him choose happiness. Deliberately. Consciously." He raised his glass. "I flew through four airports and ran through Heathrow and sat in a middle seat for eleven hours to be here tonight because some things are worth running through airports for." He looked at them both. "You two are worth running through airports for."
He raised his glass.
"To the couple who proved that the best plans are the ones that fail completely and turn into something better," he said. "To Aria and Damien."
The table raised their glasses.
Aria looked at Julian across the table.
He looked back at her.
She mouthed: Thank you.
He shook his head slightly. Thank you, he mouthed back.
She understood what he meant.
****
ARIA’S POV
Later....much later, when the food was finished and the tables had been pushed back and the cellist had been replaced by something with more rhythm and people were dancing in the west garden under the lights that Mrs Chen’s nephew had strung between the trees at some point in the last week
Damien found her.
She was standing at the edge of the dancing watching her mother and Alexander....properly dancing, not the careful proximity they’d been maintaining for months but actually dancing, Mei’s head tipped back laughing at something Alexander had said, his hand at her waist and his face doing the open unguarded thing it only did for her.
She felt Damien behind her before he reached her.
His hands came to her waist.
His lips to her shoulder.
"Hi wife," he said quietly.
She felt the word everywhere.
"Hi husband," she said.
He turned her gently and she went and they found their place in the dancing and she put her head against his chest and felt his heartbeat and looked at the garden....the lights, the people, Richard at the table still talking to Julian with the focused attention of a man who had decided Julian was worth talking to which was the highest possible endorsement. Marcus at the edge of things as he always was, present and watching. Lucy dancing with Sebastian in a way that Aria filed away for future conversation.
Her mother laughing.
Her father’s face open and unguarded.
The east garden just visible beyond....the arch still standing, the peonies still in their rows, the path she’d walked down this morning in the early light.
She closed her eyes.
She thought about a girl with a false name and a desperate plan.
She thought about everything that plan had failed to account for.
She thought about this....the lights and the dancing and the people who had become hers in the strangest and most roundabout and most completely irreversible way.
"What are you thinking," Damien said against her hair.
She opened her eyes.
She looked up at him.
"That I would do all of it again," she said. "Every piece. The false name and the two weeks that turned into everything and all of it." She held his gaze. "I would do every single piece of it again."
He looked at her.
"So would I," he said.
She put her head back against his chest.
They danced.
Around them the garden went on being exactly what it was....warm and full and completely theirs....and the night did what nights did when everything was finally right.
It lasted.
