Chapter Fifty

Jules' POV

Madeline had insisted on tradition, which meant that the night before the wedding I was not allowed to see Adam, a rule I found simultaneously absurd, given that we had been living in the same house for the better part of a year, and oddly moving, given how seriously Madeline enforced it — relocating Adam to the guest cottage by the lake for the night with a firmness that brooked no negotiation, despite his clear and visible reluctance to be parted from us even for twelve hours.

"It's one night," Madeline had told him, physically herding him toward the door with his overnight bag. "You've waited four years. You can wait twelve more hours."

"That's not actually a fair comparison," Adam had said, but he'd gone, pausing at the door to find me across the kitchen and mouth I love you with an expression so genuinely wounded by the separation that I'd nearly broken the rule myself just to spare him the night.

I didn't. Madeline's resolve on the matter of tradition was, I had learned over the years, not a force to be reasoned with.

* * *

Eli was asleep — exhausted from a full day of wedding preparation activities he had taken extremely seriously, including a final, thorough inspection of the garden's wildflower row, which had begun, miraculously, to show its first small green shoots, perfectly timed, as if the universe had decided to reward our patience.

I sat in my room that evening with the wedding dress hanging on the closet door — simple, ivory, nothing elaborate, exactly what I had wanted, chosen on a single afternoon trip into the city with Madeline that had taken less than two hours because I had known the moment I saw it that it was right — and I thought about all the women who should have been here for this and weren't.

My mother, who I barely remembered, who had run from Dorian's world to build something safer and had died before she could see any of what came after.

My little sister, lost to the lake at an age too young to understand what losing meant.

Nana, who had raised me through every loss that came after, who had died alone in a fire while I drove twelve hours toward a different kind of devastation, who would have loved this — the garden, the simple dress, the man who had finally, properly earned his place.

I sat with the grief of their absence for a while, because I had learned, in the years since the fire, that grief and joy could occupy the same room without canceling each other out, that you could miss people fiercely on the happiest day of your life and that missing them didn't diminish the joy, it simply gave it depth, gave it roots, made it something that understood its own cost.

There was a knock at my door.

Dorian.

He had arrived that afternoon for the rehearsal and was staying in the main house, in the room down the hall that had become, informally, his room whenever he visited, which was often now, the relationship between us having grown steadily over the months from careful and formal into something that more closely resembled what a grandfather and granddaughter were supposed to be.

"I saw your light on," he said. "May I come in?"

"Of course."

He sat in the chair by the window, the same careful, deliberate way he occupied every space, and looked at the dress hanging on the closet door for a long moment before he spoke.

"Your mother wore something similar," he said. "When she married your father. Simple. No fuss. I remember being surprised by it, at the time — I had expected, given the world I came from, that she would want something grander. She told me grand things were for people who needed to prove something. She said she had nothing left to prove."

I felt my throat tighten. "I didn't know that."

"There's a great deal I should have told you sooner," Dorian said. "I'm trying to make up for lost time, though I'm aware that time, once lost, isn't actually recoverable. I can only add to what's left."

We sat together for a while in comfortable silence, the kind that had grown easier between us with each visit, each dinner, each small accumulated proof that he intended to stay present now in a way he hadn't allowed himself to be for eighteen years.

"I'm nervous," I admitted. "Not about Adam. About all of it. The whole — being seen. Everyone watching."

"That's reasonable," Dorian said. "You've spent a great deal of your life trying not to be seen. Hiding in cities chosen by closing your eyes on a map. Building things quietly so they couldn't be taken from you in the open." He looked at me steadily. "Tomorrow you will stand in a garden in front of the people who love you and let them see you completely. That is a different kind of bravery than the one you've practiced. I understand why it frightens you."

"Will you walk me down?" I asked, though we had already discussed this, though it had already been decided weeks ago, because I needed to ask it again, directly, in this quiet room, to hear him say yes one more time.

"It would be the greatest honor of what remains of my life," he said, and his voice was rough in a way I had rarely heard from him.

I reached over and took his hand, the same gesture from the fireside dinner months ago, the same steady, weathered grip.

"I love you," I said. "I don't think I've said that to you directly yet. I should have. I love you, and I'm so glad you finally let yourself be found."

Dorian's composure, usually so carefully maintained, cracked slightly. He pressed his other hand briefly over his eyes.

"I love you too, Julia," he said, when he could speak again. "I have loved you your entire life, from a distance that nearly killed me to maintain. Thank you for letting me close enough to say it properly."

We sat together until the house went fully quiet, until Madeline's door closed down the hall and Eli's nightlight was the only light left on anywhere, and I thought, sitting there with my grandfather in the dark the night before my wedding, that this — this accumulated, hard-won, unlikely family, gathered from grief and distance and second chances — was its own kind of miracle, every bit as significant as the one waiting for me tomorrow in the garden.

* * *

After Dorian said goodnight and went to his room, I lay in bed for a long time without sleeping, the dress a pale shape on the closet door in the dark, my mind moving through everything that had brought me here — the holding cell, the rain at Nana's grave, the highway miles to Millhaven, Madeline's door opening onto a stranger with two duffel bags, the nightlight, the hospital, Eli's first cry. The hallway in the dark when Adam found us again. The trains. The baseball game. The fire, twice now, and surviving both. The lake house. The therapy room with its careful plants. The pancakes. The ring shaped like a field at dusk.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A text from Adam, sent from the guest cottage across the lawn, close enough that I could probably have seen his window light if I'd gotten up to look.

Madeline's rules are cruel and unusual. I miss you from approximately two hundred feet away. Sleep well, Starlight. Tomorrow I get to marry you.

I held the phone against my chest for a moment, smiling in the dark, and typed back: Tomorrow I get to marry you too. Go to sleep. Twelve hours, remember.

Twelve hours, he wrote back. I can do twelve hours. I did three years. Twelve hours is nothing.

I laughed softly into the dark room, alone but not lonely, surrounded by the quiet sounds of a house full of people who loved me — Eli's even breathing down the hall, Madeline's restless turning two doors down, Dorian settling into sleep in the room that had become, gradually and without anyone deciding it formally, simply his — and I thought about how strange and good it was, to be this loved, this surrounded, after so many years of believing I would have to build everything entirely alone.

I set the phone down. I closed my eyes.

Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I marry him.

I slept better than I had any right to expect, given the size of what was coming, and when I woke at dawn the light through my window was already gold, already certain, already exactly the color of a beginning.