Novels by Smart Imuere

Emma woke before the house did, the first gray light just reaching the curtains, Ethan still asleep beside her with one arm thrown loosely across the space where she'd been lying.She lay still a moment, listening. No phone buzzing on the nightstand. No car in the drive that shouldn't be there. Only the ordinary quiet of a house with nothing left to guard against, the pipes ticking faintly somewhere below as the heating stirred awake on its own schedule.She thought, as she often did lately, of another morning years ago, one that had started in panic rather than peace. A missing bride. A role nobody had asked her to fill. A dress that had belonged, in every sense that mattered then, to someone else's life.She had walked into that morning as a replacement. She had no memory of choosing anything about it at all.This morning she had chosen everything. The dress. The hedge Theodore insisted on counting his steps from. The ring resting now alongside the first one on her hand. The man sti

Nobody's phone rang during the reception. Emma noticed it the way she noticed anything that had once been constant and had finally, quietly, stopped.She mentioned it to Ethan while they stood near the dessert table, plates balanced in their hands, Elias three slices deep into a cake Theodore had insisted on ordering from the same bakery that had catered Richard's own wedding decades earlier."No phones," she said. "Nobody's checking one. I keep waiting for it to feel strange.""Does it?" Ethan asked."No," Emma said. "It feels like the party is actually just a party."Nathan proved this himself, dancing badly and without shame near the center of the lawn, tie loosened and jacket abandoned somewhere behind him, Maya laughing too hard to properly correct his footing, his phone sitting forgotten on a chair twenty feet away, screen dark."I've never seen him let it out of reach," Ethan said, watching with open delight."Progress," Emma said. "Slow, but real."Richard found them during a

The officiant, a soft-spoken woman Rosalind had found through the archive's own network, stepped back after the ring exchange, smoothing her notes against her palm, and gave the clearing a nod that meant the formal part was finished and the rest belonged to them."We wrote our own vows," Ethan told the gathered chairs, his voice carrying easily in the quiet, one hand still resting at the small of Emma's back. "Neither of us showed the other beforehand. I'd like that honesty to start here too."A soft laugh moved through the guests, Nathan's the loudest among them, quickly muffled behind his own hand while Maya elbowed him for it.Ethan turned fully to Emma, folding the small card in his hand without looking at it, apparently having decided somewhere in the last few minutes that he didn't need it."I used to think protecting you was the whole of what I owed you," he said. "I built an entire marriage around that idea, at first. Keep her safe. Keep her informed. Keep the danger far enoug

The hedge Theodore had insisted on counting every step from stood trimmed and full, early autumn light slanting gold across thirty chairs arranged in a half circle instead of rows, nothing between the guests and the small clearing but open grass.Emma stood at the edge of it in a dress with no train to manage and no cameras waiting to catch her walking, the fabric simple enough to move in rather than be arranged by someone else's hands. Richard's arm was steady under hers, Theodore already seated beside Audrey, his part of the walk finished and visibly treasured, his good coat still faintly creased from where he'd kept adjusting it all morning."Ready?" Richard asked quietly."I've been ready for months," Emma said. "I just didn't know it yet."Richard laughed, surprised into it, and the sound carried just far enough that a few heads turned toward them with open affection rather than curiosity.The music started the moment they stepped past the hedge, exactly as promised, nothing gran

Nathan arrived with a clipboard, which told Emma everything she needed to know about how seriously he intended to take an event he kept insisting wasn't his responsibility."I'm not planning it," he said, setting the clipboard down anyway and squaring its edges against the table. "I'm simply ensuring nobody double-books the garden.""You've color-coded the tabs," Emma said."Organization isn't the same as involvement."Elias had opinions before anyone asked for them, climbing onto the chair beside Emma's with a drawing already clutched in one fist."I want to carry the rings," he announced. "On a pillow. Like a king.""Ring bearers don't usually wear crowns," Ethan said."This one does," Elias said, holding up his drawing as evidence. It showed a small figure in a gold paper crown standing beside two enormous circles labeled, in careful six-year-old lettering, RINGS."We'll discuss the crown," Emma said, fighting to keep a straight face."There's nothing to discuss," Elias said. "I al

Ethan asked properly the next evening, on the same terrace where they'd sat through a hundred ordinary nights this past year, no ring hidden in dessert, no orchestrated surprise, no string quartet waiting in the hedges. Just the two of them and the last light fading over the garden."Emma Kingsley," he said, taking both her hands in his. "Will you marry me? Not because anyone needs you to. Not because a crisis demands it. Only because I choose you, completely, and I'd like the whole world to watch me say so properly this time.""Yes," Emma said, not a moment of hesitation in it. "Though I believe I have conditions.""I'd expect nothing less," Ethan said, laughing."No cameras," Emma said. "No board members pretending to care about our happiness for the sake of a press release. No company anywhere near it.""Done," Ethan said. "What else?""No family business disguised as a family celebration," Emma continued. "I spent my first wedding surrounded by people who needed something from us.