Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
LUKE
This morning, a cream envelope arrived at Andi’s office at MaxMorgan.
She called me at seven-thirty. She read me the three lines. Then she said, “I’m getting ready.”
That was the conversation. Not, “Should we postpone?” Not, “Should we tell Bill first?” Not, “What does this mean?” She read it, she sat with it for whatever the silence between us was, and then she said she was getting ready.
And I said, “I’ll see you soon.”
Because Evelyn Carrington sending a note today is not a reason to stop.
It might be the opposite. It’s a woman watching us get married and choosing to make sure we know she’s watching.
And the answer to that, the only answer, is to get married anyway.
In the house my parents decorated. In front of the people we’ve been protecting this whole time.
Today, specifically, which belongs to us and not to her.
Bill has the envelope. The FBI will have it by the end of the day. That’s all that needed doing. The rest of today is ours.
Mack tells me to breathe.
He says it the way he says everything—not as a suggestion, but as an observation that functions as a command.
We’re in the hallway outside the living room, which my mother has spent three weeks transforming into something that looks like it was always meant to host a wedding.
White and green, candles everywhere, the gathered warmth of a December house prepared for something important.
“I’m breathing,” I say.
“Deeper,” he says.
I breathe deeper.
He looks at me the way he has before fights—the final assessment, the last read. Then he nods once, the same nod he gave me in the Vegas locker room and in the gym when he decided I was ready.
“She’s good for you,” he says.
“I agree.”
“And you’re good for her.” He says it like a correction—like I might not know that part. “Don’t forget the second half.”
Brandon appears at the end of the hallway. He’s in the suit he wore to his first serious governance council meeting, which I know because he told me. That’s very Brandon—using something significant for something more significant. He looks at Mack, then at me.
“Ready?” he says.
I look at him. The broken nose is mostly healed, and the hand is fully healed. I admire this man who has been through the worst version of a year and has come out of it with his integrity intact and his family closer than before.
“Ready,” I say.
We walk in.
The room is small by design.
Thirty people, maybe fewer. My parents in the front row—my mother already crying, as she announced she would and has done with full commitment.
My father is beside her, his hand over hers.
Alicia, Greg, Jacob, and Callie are beside my parents.
Shane, Will, Katie, Christina, and Tania fill the middle rows.
Shane is managing his expression with visible effort. Will is not managing his at all.
Bill is here. Daniel’s attorney sent flowers. Daniel is not yet in a place where rooms full of people are comfortable, which Andi understood completely and told him so.
Kelly is in the second-to-last row, wearing the dress she chose herself, sitting beside Deja, who has understood for months that she is part of this family, whether or not the paperwork has caught up. The members of Sound Bar and Fireflies take up the last row.
Mrs. Alvarez is there. She sits with the quiet dignity of someone who has earned their place in a room and knows it.
Travis is at the front with his guitar.
He looks at me as I take my place beside Brandon. Gives me the slight nod of a man who has left something unfinished for a long time and has decided today is the day to finish it.
The room settles.
And then Mack appears in the doorway.
And Andi is beside him.
She wears a simple white outfit that I couldn’t describe exactly if asked. My gaze isn’t on the dress but on her face. Her expression shows a firm resolve, moving confidently toward her future, which she does effortlessly—and yet, she still takes my breath away every time.
She’s looking at me.
Only at me.
Mack walks her in with the solemnity of a man who doesn’t use it lightly.
His hand over hers on his arm, his chin up, his pace exactly right.
A profound hush has fallen over the room; it’s the intentional quiet of an audience captivated by a significant moment, showing respect through their focused attention.
They reach the front.
Mack looks at me.
He gently frees Andi’s hand from his arm, holding it briefly—just a moment—and in his expression, there’s a look that shows he’s made his decision, even though he feels the cost of it. Then, he places her hand in mine.
He steps back.
He finds the chair beside my mother, sits down, and my mother immediately takes his hand without looking at him. He lets her, which tells me everything I need to know about what this day means to the people in this room.
I look at Andi.
She looks at me.
“Hi,” she says. Quietly. Just for us.
“Hi, baby,” I say.
Travis begins to play. Just his voice and his acoustic guitar, a song he wrote for us as a wedding gift. The verses are perfect—our bond through his eyes, effortless and exact. But it’s the chorus that wrecks me.
I will be there to hold you when you cry
I will be there to watch you when you fly
There’s nothing I can’t do with you by my side
I watch you walk the aisle as my bride
From this day forth, I call you… my wife
The vows are ours.
We wrote them separately, as Bill suggested, and it turned out to be exactly right—two people who say what they mean, saying what they mean without knowing what the other would say, and arriving at something that fits together anyway.
She goes first.
She talks about the center. About building a door because she knew what it needed to be.
About understanding, eventually, that she hadn’t built it only for other people—that she needed the door too, and that he was what she found when she finally walked through it.
She talks about the difference between being protected and being seen.
About what it cost her to learn that difference and what it meant when someone taught it to her without realizing they were teaching it.
She looks at me the whole time she speaks.
I don’t take my eyes off her.
Then it’s my turn.
I’ve thought about this for weeks. I’m not a man who has always known the right words.
Andi knows this, and everyone in this room knows it.
It’s one of the things I’ve had to build alongside everything else.
But I know what I want to say. I’ve known since the morning after the fight, when I woke up before she did, lay in the dark of the Vegas hotel room, and fully and without qualification understood what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
“I spent a long time thinking that protecting someone meant getting in front of them,” I say.
“Between them and whatever was coming. Deciding what they could handle. Managing the distance so they wouldn’t have to feel the whole weight of it.
” I hold her gaze. “I was wrong about that. You showed me I was wrong—not by telling me, but by being someone who didn’t need that version of protection.
Who needed something different.” I pause.
“Next to you. Not in front of you. That’s where I’m supposed to be.
That’s where I’m going to be. For everything that comes—and things will come, we both know that—I will be next to you.
Not managing it for you. Not carrying it instead of you.
Next to you, while you carry what’s yours and I carry what’s mine, and we figure out the rest together. ”
The room is very quiet.
Andi is gazing at me with that look she has when something has hit exactly where it was meant to, and she’s chosen to accept it.
“That’s everything,” she says. Quietly. Just for me.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s everything.”
Travis plays the song after.
Not a song—the song. The one he started writing in the back of the tour bus eighteen months ago, the one he played in fragments for Andi on the Sound Bar tour when it was still taking shape, the one he told her he’d finish once he knew how it ended.
He knows how it ends now.
He plays it all the way through.
I don’t know all the words—it’s the first time anyone has heard the complete version.
But I know what it’s about because I know what it was written in response to.
A woman who built something in the middle of everything trying to destroy it, and the year it took to understand that what she built was big enough to hold more than she had thought.
Shane is not managing his expression at all now.
Will has given up entirely.
My mother is crying so deeply that my father has produced a handkerchief from somewhere, one that nobody knew he carried, which is one of the small revelations that days like this produce.
Kelly, in the second-to-last row, has her hand over her mouth. Deja, beside her, has her head tilted slightly, listening the way she listens to things she’s decided are worth hearing—completely, without pretending she’s doing something else.
Mrs. Alvarez has her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed.
Mack is looking at the ceiling.
When Travis finishes, there is a moment of complete silence in a room that has received something and needs a breath before it responds.
Then the room responds.
We eat in the kitchen, the dining room, and wherever there’s a surface because my mother has cooked for thirty people and intends to feed them all twice.
Shane has found the speakers and is managing the music with the same serious commitment he brings to everything he considers worth doing.
Brandon is at the kitchen table with Kelly and Deja, the three of them in a conversation I can’t hear that makes Kelly laugh until she covers her face.
I find Andi by the window in the living room, away from the noise for a moment, looking at the backyard. I come to stand beside her. She leans into me without looking away from the window.
“Mack,” she says.
“I know.”
“He gave me away,” she says. “He actually—” She stops. Starts again. “I didn’t know how much I needed that until he was walking me in and I understood that this is what it’s supposed to feel like. To have someone give you away who you know will still be there after.”
I put my arm around her.
“He’ll always be there,” I say.
“I know.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Your parents too.”
“Yes.”
“And Brandon.”
“Him too.”
She looks at the backyard. At the December garden, bare but still itself.
“Luke?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Travis finished the song.”
“He did.”
“It was everything I hoped it would be.”
“Yes,” I say. “It was.”
She turns to look at me. My wife—the word is new in my head, not strange, just new, like something that has arrived in the right size for the space it was always going to occupy.
“What do you want to do now?” she says.
I look at the room behind us. At my family and her family, and at the people who chose both of us and ended up in the same room because of it.
At Shane managing the speakers with extreme seriousness.
At Brandon making Kelly laugh, and purposely including Deja in their interactions without making it obvious.
At Mack in the corner, holding court, my father beside him again, the two of them apparently not done with whatever conversation they started in the driveway months ago.
“This,” I say. “I want to do exactly this.”
She looks at me for a moment.
Then she takes my hand and pulls me back into the room.