Chapter 24 #2
“I promise to choose you,” Dean says. “To show up for you, to fight for you, to stand by you even when you’re being impossible, which is most of the time.”
“Hey,” Jo protests, laughing through her tears.
“I promise to love you for the rest of my life. And Rex promises to eventually stop growling at your furniture.”
More laughter. Rex, sitting beside Asher, thumps his tail like he knows he’s being discussed.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the officiant says. “You may kiss your bride.”
Dean doesn’t hesitate. He pulls Jo into his arms and kisses her like they’re the only two people on the beach, like five years of grief have finally led him back to joy.
The crowd erupts in cheers, Rex howls, and the book club women are absolutely losing it.
And Delilah is looking at me with an expression that makes my heart stop.
This, her eyes seem to say. I want this.
Me too, I think back. Me too.
The reception is chaos in the best possible way.
The Hensley House interior has been transformed into something magical, fairy lights strung everywhere, flowers on every surface, tables arranged around a dance floor that’s already filling up. The Salty Pearl is handling the catering, and Tally’s dessert display looks like edible art.
I’m standing near the bar, watching the room, when a voice cuts through the noise.
“There he is! The best man who gave the worst toast!”
I turn to find Lucky Susan bearing down on me, Harold, trailing behind her looking vaguely terrified. She’s wearing a dress covered in tropical flowers, and there’s a massive diamond ring on her left hand.
“I thought my toast was pretty good,” I say.
“It was adequate.” She waves a hand dismissively. “But never mind that. Harold has something to show you.”
Harold holds up his left hand, displaying a wedding band. “She finally said yes. After forty-three years of me asking.”
“He proposed properly this time,” Susan adds. “On one knee and everything. He cried.”
“Congratulations,” I say, genuinely happy for them. “When’s the wedding?”
“Last Tuesday. Courthouse. We didn’t want to wait.” Susan beams at her husband. “Forty-three years together and he finally made an honest woman of me.”
They wander off toward the dance floor, Harold’s hand on the small of Susan’s back, and I think about all the ways love can find you. First chances, second chances, forty-third chances if that’s what it takes.
“They’re cute.”
I turn to find Delilah beside me, champagne glass in hand, that soft green dress making her eyes look impossibly bright.
“Susan threatened to file a complaint with the fire department if Harold didn’t propose,” I say. “I think Dean talked her down.”
“That tracks.” She takes a sip of her champagne, watching the dance floor. “The flowers look good.”
“The flowers are incredible.” I step closer. “You did all this in three days?”
“I had help. Mom, mostly. And the book club, when they weren’t crying about the wedding.” She pauses. “Eleanor and I worked together all week. It was…good. Really good.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me too.” She looks up at me, something vulnerable in her expression. “I stayed, Levi. I actually stayed.”
“I noticed.”
“Three whole days.” A small laugh escapes her. “Might be a personal record.”
“Then let’s make it four.” I take the champagne glass from her hand, set it on the nearest table. “And then five. And then the rest of our lives.”
Her breath catches. “Levi...”
“Wait.” I take her hand. “There’s something I need to do first.”
The makeshift stage is just a raised platform near the windows, nothing fancy, but it’s got good acoustics and a view of the ocean through the glass. Dean set it up because Jo wanted live music, and Jo gets what Jo wants. That’s just how things work now.
I pick up my guitar, the same one I’ve had since I was seventeen, and adjust the microphone.
“Hey, everyone.”
The room quiets. Faces turn toward me. Dean and Jo are at their sweetheart table, arms around each other.
The book club is clustered near the front.
Asher and Mads are slow-dancing even though there’s no music yet.
And Delilah is standing near the back, watching me with those eyes that have haunted me for twenty years.
“So Dean asked me to sing something,” I say. “He said, and I quote, ‘Nothing fancy, just one song, and don’t make it weird.’”
Laughter from the crowd. Dean shakes his head.
“But here’s the thing.” I adjust the guitar strap. “Three days ago, I drove four and a half hours in the middle of the night to find a woman I’ve loved since I was seventeen years old. I found her at a cemetery, talking to her father’s headstone, convinced she wasn’t worth staying for.”
The room is silent now. Delilah’s hand is pressed to her chest.
“She was wrong. She’s worth everything. And on the drive back, I wrote this song. It’s the first thing I’ve written in months, maybe the first real thing I’ve written in years.” I look directly at her. “It’s called ‘Staying.’”
I start to play.
The melody is simple, something that came to me on a dark highway with no sleep and too much coffee, my heart cracked open and bleeding hope for the first time in forever. The words are simpler, because the truth usually is.
I sing about running, about twenty years of almost and not quite, about a girl with flowers in her hair who taught me what it meant to want something I couldn’t have.
I sing about coming home. Showing up even when it’s terrifying. Choosing someone, every day, even when they make it hard.
And I sing about staying. Planting roots in a small town by the sea. Love that doesn’t leave, that doesn’t give up, that shows up at cemeteries in the middle of the night because some things are worth chasing.
The last note fades into silence.
Then the room explodes.
Cheering, applause, the book club absolutely losing their minds. Jo is crying. Dean is pretending he’s not. Mads has her phone out, definitely recording, probably already posting to every social media platform known to man.
But I only see Delilah.
She’s crying too, but she’s smiling, and she’s walking toward me, pushing through the crowd, not running away for once.
I set down the guitar and meet her halfway.
“That song,” she says, voice cracking.
“Was about you. Obviously.”
“You wrote that on the drive back?”
“Somewhere around hour three. I was running on caffeine and desperation.”
She laughs, wiping her eyes. “It’s beautiful.”
“You’re gorgeous.” I cup her face in my hands. “And I meant every word. I’m not going anywhere, Delilah. LA, New York, wherever the music takes me, I’m coming back here. To Twin Waves. To you.”
“What about your career?”
“I can write anywhere. I can record in LA when I need to. But home is here now.” I rest my forehead against hers. “Home is wherever you are.”
“That’s very cheesy,” she whispers.
“I’m a songwriter. Cheesy is literally my job.”
She laughs again, and then she’s kissing me, right there in the middle of the dance floor, with half of Twin Waves watching and the book club cheering and Rex barking and somewhere Jo is yelling “Finally!”
When we break apart, she’s glowing.
“I’m done running,” she says.
“I know.”
“I mean it this time.”
“I know that too.”
“So what happens now?”
I pull her close, start swaying to music that isn’t playing yet. “Now we take it one day at a time. Four days, then five, then the rest of our lives. We figure it out as we go.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
“Absolutely. But I’d rather be terrified with you than safe with anyone else.”
The DJ starts playing something slow, and suddenly we’re surrounded by other couples.
Dean and Jo, wrapped up in each other. Asher and Mads, young and glowing and planning their own wedding.
Even Harold and Susan, forty-three years together and finally married.
In the corner, Rex and Ruffy are curled up together under a table, exhausted from all the excitement.
Delilah rests her head on my chest, and I hold her close, breathing in the scent of flowers and salt air and home.
I spent twenty years writing songs about losing her.
Now I get to write songs about staying.
Later, much later, we’re standing on the back deck, watching the sun set over the ocean. The party is still going inside, but we slipped away for a moment of quiet.
“Eleanor cornered me earlier,” I say. “Told me she approves.”
“She told me she always liked you. Even back then, when she was warning me away.” Delilah shakes her head. “Turns out she was just scared. Scared I’d get hurt, scared I’d run. Which I did anyway, so I guess she wasn’t wrong.”
“But you came back.”
“I always came back.” She turns to look at me. “That’s the thing I finally understand. Running was never about leaving you. It was about being afraid I wasn’t enough to make you stay.”
“You were always enough.”
“I know that now.” She takes my hand. “It just took me twenty years and a cemetery breakdown to figure it out.”
I laugh, pull her against my side. “Remind me to send your dad’s headstone a thank-you card.”
“He remembered you,” she says quietly. “From all those summers I cried about you. He would’ve said you were too stubborn to give up on me.”
“Smart man.”
“He really was.”
We stand there in comfortable silence, watching the colors shift across the sky. Inside, someone turns up the music, and I hear Hazel’s distinctive cackle followed by what sounds like a conga line forming.
“We should probably go back in,” Delilah says.
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves.
“Five hours,” she says suddenly.
“What?”
“The drive to Asheville. Five hours.” She looks up at me. “You drove five hours on no sleep to find me.”
“Four and a half.”
“What?”
“I may have broken a few speed limits.”
She laughs, wiping at her eyes. “Levi...”
“I’d have driven fifty.”
“I know.” Her voice is soft. “That’s the part I still can’t believe. That someone would do that for me.”
“Get used to it.” I turn her to face me, tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life showing you what you’re worth. And when you forget, I’ll just remind you.”
“Even if I try to run again?”
“Even then. I’ll chase you every time.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“Probably.” I grin. “But that’s what love is, right? Showing up even when it’s hard. Choosing someone every day. Staying.”
She rises up on her toes and kisses me, soft and sweet and full of promise.
“Then let’s stay,” she whispers.
“Together?”
“Together.”
The sun sinks below the horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold. Inside, the party continues, our friends and family celebrating love in all its messy, complicated, beautiful forms.
And on the deck of the Hensley House, wrapped in each other’s arms, we watch the first stars appear and let ourselves believe in happy endings.
Not because they’re guaranteed.
But because we’re going to build one anyway.