Chapter Forty Seven

Jules' POV

Madeline's reaction to the engagement was loud enough that Victor fled the kitchen entirely and did not reappear for the rest of the afternoon, which I considered a fully reasonable response on the cat's part.

She had been at the kitchen table grading a stack of student art portfolios when I came down, still in my pajamas, cold-addled hair a wreck, and held out my hand without saying anything because I genuinely did not trust my voice. She looked up, looked at my face, looked at my hand, and made a sound I had never heard a grown woman make before — somewhere between a shriek and a sob, entirely without dignity, completely without restraint.

"HE DID IT," she said. "HE FINALLY DID IT."

"You knew?"

"Jules. Jules. He asked me three weeks ago what your ring size was. I told him I'd find out without you noticing. I have been waiting three weeks to lose my mind about this and you have no idea what that has cost me."

"You knew for three weeks and didn't say anything?"

"I'm an excellent friend," she said, already crying, already laughing, already up out of her chair and across the kitchen to pull me into a hug that nearly knocked both of us into the counter. "I am the best friend. Do you understand what I sacrificed for this surprise?"

I hugged her back, laughing, crying, the whole tangled mess of feeling that had been building since Adam knelt — not knelt, sat, on the edge of the bed, which I found myself explaining to her in detail because she demanded the full account immediately, no summary permitted.

"He didn't get on one knee?" she said, when I finished.

"He sat on the bed. In his pajamas."

"That's so much better," she said, wiping her eyes. "That's so much more him. That's so much more you two. If he'd done some big knee-bending production with a string quartet I would have had concerns."

"You would have had concerns?"

"I would have worried he hadn't actually learned anything," she said, more seriously now. "The old Adam — the one from the wedding photos you showed me once, the corporate one, the one who married you in some flashy ceremony and then tore it all apart in a week — that guy does the big knee-bending production. This guy, the one who sat on the edge of your bed in his pajamas because that's just where he was when he decided it was time? That guy actually changed."

I sat with that. She was right, in the way Madeline was reliably, infuriatingly right about the things that mattered.

"Four years," I said. "Four years, Madeline. From the holding cell to this."

"I know." She squeezed my hand, the one with the ring, careful and reverent. "I was there for most of it. I held your hand through Eli's birth and I ate consolation pasta with you for an entire year and I watched you build a whole life out of nothing, and I want you to know—" her voice caught— "I want you to know I am so proud of you. Not for getting the ring. For everything that came before the ring. For surviving all of it without it breaking you."

I hugged her again, longer this time, both of us properly crying now, the ridiculous, cathartic kind of crying that happens between women who have been through real things together.

* * *

When we finally separated, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at me with sudden, sharp focus.

"Okay," she said. "Logistics. When. Where. What am I wearing. Is there a dress code. I need to know everything immediately."

"We haven't decided anything yet. It happened an hour ago."

"Jules. I need a timeline."

"There is no timeline."

"I'm making a timeline," she said, already pulling out her phone, already typing something with the focused intensity of a woman building an event plan from nothing. "Spring wedding. Small. You'd want small — actually small, not rich-person small where two hundred people is considered intimate. You'd want, what, thirty people? Fifty? Somewhere with a garden. Somewhere with—"

"Madeline."

"What?"

"We just got engaged an hour ago."

"And I am already planning your wedding, because that is what best friends do, and also because if I don't start now Adam's assistant is going to start without me and I refuse to be outpaced by a man named Cooper who I have met exactly twice."

I laughed, the kind of full, unguarded laugh I hadn't done much of in the years before Adam came back into my life, the kind that came from somewhere deep and easy now in a way it hadn't been for a long time.

"Small wedding," I said. "A garden, maybe. People who actually matter, not people who matter for business reasons."

"Dorian gives you away," Madeline said immediately, already typing. "Obviously. He's been waiting his whole life for that, even if he doesn't know it yet."

I hadn't thought of that. The image of it landed somewhere soft and aching in my chest — Dorian, my grandfather, walking me down some garden aisle to a man who had finally, fully earned the right to stand at the end of it.

"Yes," I said, quietly. "Dorian gives me away."

Madeline looked up from her phone, caught the shift in my voice, and reached over to squeeze my hand one more time.

"This is going to be the best wedding anyone has ever had," she said. "I am personally going to make sure of it."

I believed her completely.

* * *

Over the following hour, fueled by the kind of giddy momentum that follows genuinely good news, we covered flowers (wildflowers, obviously, given the ring, a connection Madeline found unbearably romantic and made me explain three separate times), music (something simple, nothing orchestral, a single guitar if we could manage it), and the question of what Eli would wear, which turned into its own extended negotiation once Madeline pulled up Eli's opinion via a quick video call that interrupted his cartoon time and was met with predictable outrage at the interruption, followed by intense enthusiasm once he understood the subject.

"I want a suit," Eli said, with great seriousness, from the screen. "But not a tie. Ties are for strangling people."

"Where did you learn that phrase?" I asked.

"Cooper said it. About work meetings."

Madeline burst out laughing so hard she had to set her phone down. I made a mental note to have a conversation with Cooper about appropriate phrasing around small children, though I suspected it would have little effect, given that Cooper himself had become so thoroughly enmeshed in our family that scolding him felt almost beside the point.

After we hung up with Eli, Madeline turned back to me, suddenly more serious. "Can I say something sappy?"

"Always."

"I used to worry about you," she said. "In the beginning. I'd watch you with Eli, doing everything alone, never once asking for help even when you clearly needed it, and I'd think — this woman is going to wear herself down to nothing trying to prove she doesn't need anyone." She looked at me, eyes bright. "I'm so glad I was wrong. I'm so glad you let people in eventually. I'm so glad you let me in."

I reached across the table and pulled her into a hug, the portfolios and the half-finished timeline forgotten between us. "You were the first person who made staying feel safer than running," I said. "I don't think I ever properly thanked you for that."

"You just did," she said, her voice thick. "Now stop, or I'm going to ruin this entire portfolio with tears, and Brandon Whitfield's still-life of a pumpkin does not deserve to be cried on."

I laughed, and we went back to wedding planning, and the kitchen filled with the particular warm noise of two women building something joyful together, exactly the way we'd built everything else.