EPILOGUE ONE - Rory
Three New Years Later
January 1st
Dear Diary,
Piper is finally my sister-in-law!!!
I can’t believe how lucky I am to be related to my idol.
Oh, and I’m happy for my brother too LOL. His best friend and favorite person is finally legally bound to him. I am totally fine with being his second-favorite person ever since he met Piper, particularly since he regularly acknowledges that I helped him reach her.
They got married yesterday. Three New Year’s Eves after they first met face-to-face and got snowed in together on the other coast. They waited until Holden was done with his Riders duties. How We Got Here the series will be dropping its first season during Valentine’s week this year! And Piper is a best-selling self-published YA romance author who just got a deal to turn some of her books into a series, but she doesn’t have to start adapting them into a script until the spring. They finally had a window of opportunity to tie the knot, even though they’ve been as much of a couple as anyone I’ve ever known for what seems like forever.
The wedding/New Year’s celebration and unofficial would-be male butt-model convention is at a resort hotel in a huge Victorian castle on a mountaintop in the Hudson Valley. Piper and Holden got luxury tour buses to shuttle guests in from NYC. It’s only about a ninety-minute drive. Some guests flew in by private jet to a nearby airfield, ahem. It’s not a huge guest list because they wanted to keep it intimate and because it’s a holiday and involved some traveling. They’re having a reception in Los Angeles later in the month, after their honeymoon. That’s gonna be a real star-studded event, oh boy.
But that’s where I am now, at the resort. I got my own room! It’s snowing, but we aren’t snowed in. It’s just the perfect amount of snow to make it picturesque and magical. There’s a forest and a lake and super cute small towns nearby. A truly romantic winter wonderland, and I couldn’t imagine a better location for Piper’s wedding. It’s really secluded and atmospheric—I am almost inspired to write gothic noncanonical HP fanfic…
But first—I must write about the wedding. Because I was a bridesmaid! Piper had so many bridesmaids, it was like the end of 27 Dresses . It was me and her former roommates from LA, Lainey and Tracy, Imogen from Ireland, whom she’s been pen pals with for years because she’s Nolan Cassidy’s niece, and four other friends of Piper’s from New York. Her oldest friend, Shoshanna, was her maid of honor, even though Piper’s mom was campaigning to be matron of honor LOL. Poor Bex. Always the mom, never the bridesmaid.
Piper had a dress designed based on the one she’d found in a closet at the cabin in Big Bear when she first met my brother. She walked down the aisle to a string quartet playing “Dreams” by The Cranberries, looking so beautiful, there was an audible gasp from everyone in the parlor the ceremony was held in. I swear, most of the men in the room were crying. But my brother just looked so proud as he watched her walk down the aisle toward him, on her father’s arm. When her dad gave her a peck on the cheek, there was a moment when it looked like he wasn’t going to let go of her arm. It was cute and funny and only a little sad. But he gave Holden a big bro hug before finally sitting down.
Apparently, Piper’s sort-of-not-really uncle, Billy Boston, got ordained online so he could officiate Piper’s wedding, but then her actual uncle-in-law Declan got mad and felt that if anyone should officiate it would be him. And then Nolan and Eddie thought they should all be officiants, and finally Holden just said “Thank you, but no” to all of them and they hired a minister from New York.
Piper and Holden wrote their own vows, of course, and they were in the form of resolutions. It was thematically appropriate but also a nice nod to my dad’s NYE tradition for the family.
The ceremony started at six, since the party afterward was both for the wedding and New Year’s. In the afternoon before the ceremony, the groom’s party posed for pictures with their backs to the camera, lifting their jackets up, to display their epic man-butt-ness.
Needless to say, this wedding had a real party atmosphere. It was not only a celebration of the new year and Piper and Holden’s marriage but the wedding anniversary of her aunt Maddie and uncle Declan. Piper made sure everyone knew that Maddie and Declan were the guests of honor. She is just the most generous bride. It was very much HER day, but she kept saying it was a celebration of love and romance and fate and cute butts and hopeful romantics everywhere.
Piper left one empty seat at the reception for the ghost of Nora Ephron and one of the wedding cakes had the Empire State Building on it in reference to Sleepless in Seattle and An Affair to Remember . It was also a reference to the engagement pics they took at the top of the Empire State Building, wherein Piper wore a coat and scarf and braided hair like Meg Ryan at the end of Sleepless in Seattle , Holden held out his hand for her to take, and I was on my knees looking up at her, holding a teddy bear LOLOL.
Oh, and the other wedding cake was decorated like a big peach.
Instead of a guest book, they had a New Year’s Eve Wishing Wall set up for guests to write on pieces of colored paper and then pin them to the bulletin boards that were spray-painted silver and black and gold. It wasn’t dumped from the ceiling, so nobody would have to clean it up. I’m helping Piper put them all together in a scrapbook, along with photos from the event. That was my idea, although I’m sure Piper would have thought of it eventually too.
And as much as I like to take credit for leading my brother to Piper, I’m sure that he would have found his way to her eventually as well. They were MFEO—Made For Each Other. The Universe conspired to bring them together, and all they had to do was allow themselves to get snowed in under the same roof.
I think that any guy who’d end up with Piper would be the luckiest man in the world. But I’m glad the luckiest man in the world is my brother. And not just because I get to be related to her. Because I always saw the longing he had to be with someone who could inspire him, that desire to understand what the great writers were writing about. I saw it years and years before he realized it himself. And to think, it was a great writer who isn’t featured in textbooks and studied in English lit classes who finally taught him what it means to love with your heart wide open and to believe in whatever plot point it takes to get two people to their HEA.