Chapter Five

“There you are,” she said, like she’d been looking for me. Like this was a reunion and not the first time we’d ever stood in the same room. “Sebastian told us his bride was striking. I see now he understood it considerably.” She glanced back at her husband with the fond authority of a woman accustomed to being right. “Nolan, doesn’t she look exactly the way he described?”

I was silent.

“Describe how,” I said, and looked past her at Sebastian.

He had gone very still too.

“Oh, he’s spoken of you for years, dear,” his mother said, with the breezy ease of someone entirely unaware she’d just lit a fuse and set it down in the middle of the room. “He used to come home from those dreadful council sessions and,”

“Mother.” Sebastian’s voice came down through hers like a hand closing around something fragile before it could fall. Quiet. Completely final. “We should get to the Pavilion. We’re already cutting it close.”

She blinked. Recalibrated with the practiced grace of a woman who had been redirected by him before and knew when to let it go. Smiled at me like nothing had shifted. Like the sentence was just a sentence and not the beginning of something I was now going to need to unfold later in private, when there was time, when no one was watching.

But the words were still there. He’s spoken of you for years. Long before today. Just hanging in the air of my family’s entryway, untethered, waiting for somewhere to land.

Sebastian had turned and was offering me his arm with the focused air of someone engaged entirely in the logistics of forward motion, and still, still, not quite meeting my eyes.

The only person in the room who appeared to understand the precise weight of what his mother had almost said was the man currently doing everything in his power to make sure we left before she could finish saying it.

Chapter 4: What His Mother Said

I let him lead me out into the courtyard before I said anything.

Mostly because I needed the walk, the cold air, the distance, something between my mouth and the question I hadn’t yet found the right shape for. Three hours ago I had been standing in my childhood bedroom trying to stop my hands from shaking. Now I was supposed to be a bride. Now I was supposed to have a plan.

I didn’t, particularly. But I had Sebastian, which was a different kind of thing entirely.

“Your mother said you described me,” I said, once we were far enough from the house that the nearest cluster of aunts and second cousins couldn’t hear us. The words came out more carefully than I’d intended, precise, like I was placing them somewhere they couldn’t be taken back from. “Years before today. What does that mean, Sebastian.”

It wasn’t quite a question. I didn’t use the inflection. I wasn’t sure I was ready for it to be a question.

“It means,” he said, without breaking stride, “that my mother talks too much during weddings. Even ones she’s only known about for forty minutes.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”

He stopped walking. I stopped a half-step after him, and for a moment we just stood there in the middle of the courtyard, the two of us and whatever had been accumulating between us for three years without either of us naming it properly. Around us, the wedding party was finding its places, his father moving through the shuffle with a quiet authority that suggested he had done exactly this kind of thing before, just never quite under these circumstances. The music from inside swelled again, reaching for a cue that didn’t know we were stalling.

“You want the real answer,” Sebastian said. He was looking at something just past my shoulder, and then he wasn’t, he was looking at me, with a directness I wasn’t prepared for and couldn’t quite deflect. “Or the version that’s easier to hear when you’re standing in your parents’ courtyard four hours before the license gets signed.”

“The real one.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Longer than I was used to from him. Longer than any of the hundred arguments we’d had across a council table over three years had ever required,  those had been strategic looks, appraisals, the kind of attention you paid to an opponent you were actively trying to outmaneuver. This was something else. This was the way you looked at someone when you’d already decided to stop pretending.

“I voted against your rezoning proposal,” he said finally, “because I agreed with half of it, and I was terrified of what it would mean if I admitted that to you.” A pause. Not hesitation, gathering. “I voted against the harbor fund because watching you win felt like watching you not need anyone, and I’ve spent three years trying to figure out how to become someone you would. I have been losing on purpose, Mira. In the stupidest, most roundabout way a man has ever tried to get a woman’s attention. And even that,” He stopped. Started again. “Even that wasn’t half as honest as the way you called me an hour ago and asked me to marry you, because I was the one man you trusted not to flinch.”

The courtyard was still there. The music was still playing. Somewhere near the gate, his cousin was explaining the seating arrangement to a florist. Everything continued exactly as it had been, and I stood inside all of it with no response ready, none, not a word, not even the beginning of one.