Chapter 40
CHLOE
The dress was white.
Not the blinding, elaborate white of magazine covers and designer runway shows.
A simple white. Soft and flowing and reaching the floor in a gentle cascade that moved when I moved, like water, like light, like something alive.
It had thin straps and a neckline that was modest enough for a mountain wedding and low enough to make Sawyer forget how to breathe.
Dollie laced the back while I stood in front of the mirror in the small room at the back of the church and tried to remember how to be a person instead of a pile of emotions wearing a wedding dress.
“Stop shaking,” Dollie said.
“I am not shaking.”
“Your hands are doing a very good impression of it.”
“That is excitement. Not shaking.”
“Chloe Matthews. You are about to marry the love of your life in a church full of people who adore you. You are allowed to shake.”
She finished the laces and stepped back and looked at me in the mirror.
Her eyes went bright. Her hand went to her chest. And the woman who had been my best friend since we were fourteen years old, who had driven through the night to save me, who had put a tracker in a necklace because she knew me well enough to plan for the worst, pressed her lips together and tried very hard not to cry.
“Oh,” she said. “Chloe.”
“Don’t,” I said. “If you cry, I will cry, and then my face will be ruined.”
“Your face could never be ruined.”
“Dollie.”
“You look like a dream. You look like the woman Sawyer Cole has been waiting for since the day he was born, which he was, even though he did not know it. You are going to walk down that aisle and that man is going to forget his own name.”
I turned from the mirror. Looked at her. This woman who had been beside me through everything. Through the good years and the dark years and the running and the returning and the rebuilding. Who had never once let go of my hand even when I tried to pull it away.
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything. Not just today. For all of it.”
“You can thank me by naming your next child after me.”
“We do not have a next child.”
“Yet.”
Emma appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a purple dress because she had refused to wear anything that was not purple, a negotiation that had lasted three days and that she had won decisively.
Her hair was in braids with small white flowers woven through them, and her cast had been replaced with a walking boot that she had decorated with dinosaur stickers.
She looked like a fairy tale character who had taken a detour through a natural history museum.
“Mama,” she said. “You look like a princess.”
“Thank you, baby.”
“Papa is going to cry.”
“You think so?”
“He cries at everything now. He cried at my school play. He cried when I lost my tooth. He cried when Captain Fluffington fell off the bed.”
“Captain Fluffington is fine.”
“Papa was not fine. He thought Captain Fluffington was hurt.” She paused. Looked at me with those green eyes that were so much like his, serious and searching. “Are you happy, Mama?”
I crouched down. Took her hands. Looked into the face of the child who had been the reason for everything, every choice, every sacrifice, every mile of running and every step of coming back.
“I am the happiest I have ever been,” I said.
She smiled. Wide and certain and carrying the full confidence of a child who had been told something she already knew.
“Good,” she said. “Because I already told everyone at school that my mama is marrying a lumberjack and they are very excited.”
The music started.
Dollie went first. Down the aisle with flowers in her hands and tears she was no longer trying to hide streaming down her face. Then Emma, my flower girl, walking carefully in her boot, scattering petals with the focused determination of a child performing the most important job in the world.
Then me.
The church was small. Wooden pews. Tall windows that let the mountain light pour in, golden and warm, filling the space with the kind of glow that did not need candles or decorations to be beautiful.
The pews were filled with people. Sawyer’s crew, cleaned up and wearing the stunned expressions of men who owned one good shirt and were wearing it.
Sawyer’s parents, his mother already weeping, his father holding her hand with the quiet, steady presence that his son had inherited.
Josh, standing at the front beside Sawyer, his best man, solid and calm and wearing a tie for what I suspected was the third time in his life.
And Sawyer.
He was at the end of the aisle. Standing.
Waiting. Wearing a dark suit that I had never seen him in before, fitted perfectly to his broad shoulders and his tall frame, and he looked like a different person and exactly the same person at once.
His hair was combed. His jaw was clean. His hands were at his sides and his back was straight and his green eyes were locked on me with an intensity that stopped the air in my lungs.
I walked toward him.
Every step felt like a lifetime. Every step was a lifetime.
Every step was a year compressed into a single movement, a year of his life and my life and the space between us that had been filled with war and loss and distance and silence and the kind of love that did not die no matter how hard you tried to kill it.
His face changed as I got closer. The composure cracked.
The mask he wore for the world, the grumpy, stoic, impenetrable exterior that he maintained like a fortress, dissolved.
His jaw tightened. His eyes went bright.
And by the time I reached him, by the time I stood in front of him close enough to touch, his eyes were wet and his chin was trembling and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
He took my hand. His grip was shaking the way it had shaken the night he proposed, the barely perceptible tremor of a man feeling more than his body could contain.
The ceremony was simple. The pastor spoke about love and commitment and the courage it takes to choose someone every day, and I heard the words but I was not listening to the words.
I was listening to Sawyer’s breathing beside me.
To the small sounds Emma was making from the front pew where she was whispering commentary to Sir Chomps-a-Lot about the proceedings.
To the quiet sobs of Sawyer’s mother and the soft laughter of Dollie and the presence of every person in this room who had helped us get here.
We said our vows. The traditional ones. For better or worse.
For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health.
And every word felt different when you said them to someone who had already given you the worse and the poorer and the sickness and had stayed anyway.
Every word felt earned. Every promise felt like a statement of fact rather than a hope.
“I do,” I said.
“I do,” he said.
The pastor said the words. Sawyer kissed me.
Not the careful, public kiss of a man performing for an audience.
A real kiss. Deep and slow and thorough, his hands on my face, his mouth on mine, kissing me in front of everyone he knew with the same intensity he kissed me when we were alone.
The church erupted. Clapping. Whistling.
Emma shouting “They are kissing again!” from the front pew.
We were married.
The reception was at the cabin. Our cabin.
The one that had been destroyed and rebuilt and was now decorated with lights that Josh and the crew had strung through the trees around the property, turning the clearing into something out of a fairy tale.
A long table set up outside. Food from everyone, dishes brought and shared, the collective effort of a community that had decided this family belonged to them.
We danced.
The first dance was in the clearing, on a wooden platform that Sawyer had built the week before, because of course he had built it, because the man expressed love through lumber and precision and the act of making something with his hands.
The music was slow. The lights were soft.
And I stood in his arms with my head against his chest and my hand in his and moved with him in the way we always moved, naturally and without effort, two bodies that had memorized each other’s rhythms.
The tears came without warning.
Not the happy kind. Not the kind that had been flowing all day, the tears of joy and relief and the overwhelm of a woman watching her life become what she had dreamed it could be.
These were different. These came from a deeper place.
A sadder place. A place that held the people who should have been here and were not.
“I wish my mom and dad could witness this,” I said.
My voice broke and the tears spilled over and I pressed my face into his chest and felt the grief hit me with a force I had not been prepared for.
My parents. My mother who had died while I was alone and pregnant and running.
My father who had followed her months later, leaving me orphaned and adrift in a world that felt too big and too cruel.
They should have been in the pews today.
They should have seen me in this dress. They should have met their granddaughter and the man she called Papa and the life that had grown out of the ashes of everything they left behind.
Sawyer held me. His arms tight around me, his cheek pressed to the top of my head, and he let me cry without trying to fix it because he understood that some grief does not need fixing. It just needs holding.
“My brother too,” he said quietly. His voice was rough.
The kind of rough that came from his own tears, the ones he let fall into my hair where no one could see them.
“Jimmy should have been here. He would have been my best man. He would have made a speech that was too long and too embarrassing and everyone would have laughed and I would have pretended to be annoyed.”
I held him tighter.
“I know they are watching us right now,” he said.
“Your parents. Jimmy. All of them. And they are happy, Chloe. They are so happy. Because the people they loved found each other, and the life that came from all that loss is this.” He pulled back enough to look at me.
His green eyes were wet but steady. “This right here. This dance. This night. This family. They are watching and they are happy.”
I touched his face. Wiped the tears from his cheek with my thumb. He turned his head and kissed my palm, the same gesture he always made, the one that meant I love you in a language that only the two of us spoke.
“Hi, husband,” I said.
“Hi, wife.”
The music played on. We danced. Not perfectly.
Not gracefully. The stumbling, swaying, holding-on-to-each-other kind of dancing that comes from two people who are feeling too much to care about rhythm.
And in the lights strung through the trees and the stars above the mountains and the sound of our daughter laughing somewhere behind us, I felt them.
My mother. My father. Jimmy. Not as ghosts.
Not as absences. As presences. As the love that had shaped us and the loss that had broken us and the miracle that had put us back together.
Emma cut in. She appeared between us, wedging herself into the dance with the determined confidence of a child who believed she had every right to be in the middle of everything, and Sawyer lifted her with one arm and held me with the other and the three of us swayed in the lights while the music played and the mountains watched and the night wrapped around us like a blessing.
Dollie danced with Josh. Sawyer’s parents danced slowly in the corner, his mother’s head on his father’s shoulder. The crew danced with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm, some of them with partners and some of them alone and all of them laughing.
The night went on. The food was eaten. The cake was cut, a real one this time, professionally made, though Emma had insisted on adding a green frosting dinosaur to the top tier and no one had argued.
Toasts were given. Josh’s was short and sincere.
Dollie’s was long and emotional and included three stories that made me blush so hard I hid behind my bouquet.
Emma’s toast was a single sentence delivered with total conviction: “My mama and papa are the best people in the whole world and Sir Chomps-a-Lot agrees.”
Late in the evening, when the party had softened to quiet conversations and the lights in the trees looked like earthbound stars, I stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at the life I had built.
Sawyer was behind me. His arms around my waist. His chin on my shoulder. The ring on my finger matching the ring on his, two simple bands catching the last of the light.
“Happy?” he asked.
“More than I have words for.”
“Good. Because I am terrible at this and I need to know it is working.”
I laughed. Leaned back against him. Felt the solid, warm, immovable presence of the man who had gone from a grumpy lumberjack eating cold eggs alone to a husband and a father standing in a clearing full of the people he loved.
“It is working,” I said.
He pressed his lips to my temple. And we stood there in the quiet night, married, together, home, while the mountains held the sky above us and the trees held the lights around us and our daughter held a stuffed dinosaur somewhere behind us, and the world, for once, was exactly as it should be.
The End