35. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
We get married again on a Saturday, six months later, and this time it’s ours.
The morning starts with Olivia bursting into our room at six a.m., already in her purple dress, demanding to know if it’s time yet.
It’s not time yet. It won’t be time for another five hours.
But she’s too excited to sleep, too excited to eat breakfast, too excited to do anything except bounce around the house asking everyone she sees if they know it’s a wedding day.
“I know it’s a wedding day,” Danny tells her, catching her mid-bounce and swinging her up onto his hip. “I’m the one giving the toast. I’ve been practicing for weeks.”
My brother is twenty now, pink-cheeked and whole, his hair grown all the way back from the chemo. He’s been in remission for eight months. The doctors say he’s doing well. The doctors say he’s going to be fine. And I believe them now, in a way I couldn’t believe anything good for a very long time.
“What’s your toast about?” Olivia asks him.
“It’s about how your dad is an idiot who got very, very lucky.”
“Daddy’s not an idiot.”
“He’s a little bit of an idiot.” Danny grins at her. “But the good kind. The kind that works out eventually.”
I leave them to their debate about the relative idiocy of Callum Lippitt and go to find the man himself. He’s in the study, standing at the window, looking out at the lawn where rows of chairs are being arranged.
“Having second thoughts?” I ask from the doorway.
He turns. He’s already in his suit, simple and well-cut, nothing like the armor he used to wear to board meetings and charity galas. His hair is slightly disheveled, like he’s been running his hands through it.
“No,” he says. “Just trying to figure out how I got here.”
“You proposed. I said yes. There were some logistics.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He crosses to me, takes my hands. “A year ago, I was standing in my study offering a contract to a woman I thought I could keep at arm’s length. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I had everything under control.”
“You were an idiot.”
“I was absolutely an idiot.” He smiles, and it transforms his whole face. “And now I’m standing here about to marry the same woman for real, with my daughter in a purple dress and my mother-in-law’s roses on the lawn, and I have no idea how any of this happened.”
“Your mother-in-law doesn’t have roses. Your mother-in-law has been dead for years.”
“I know. I had Mrs. Fairfax plant some in her honor. I was going to tell you, but then I thought it might be a nice surprise.”
My throat goes tight. “You planted roses for my mother?”
“She should be here. I thought this was a way to have her here.” He squeezes my hands. “If that’s overstepping, I can have them removed. I didn’t mean to-”
I kiss him before he can finish apologizing for doing something unbearably thoughtful.
“Leave the roses,” I say against his mouth. “And stop being so perfect. It’s making me nervous.”
“I’m not perfect.”
“No, but you’re trying very hard to be, and it’s very annoying, and I love you anyway.”
It’s not the first time I’ve said it. That happened three months ago, in the dark, in our bed, in the aftermath of a fight about something neither of us can remember anymore. But it still feels new every time. It still feels like a door opening.
“I love you too,” he says. “Even though you’re marrying me for my money.”
“Especially because I’m marrying you for your money. Do you have any idea how expensive nursing school is?”
He laughs, and I lean into him, and we stand there in the study holding each other while outside the window the chairs multiply and the flowers appear and the day arranges itself into something that looks like a wedding.
The ceremony happens at noon, on the lawn, with the water sparkling behind us and the people who actually want to be here scattered across the chairs.
No society columnists. No seating charts arranged by Adelaide’s careful hand.
No one who’s here because they want to be seen or because they’re afraid of being left out.
Just us. Just the people who matter.
Danny walks me down the lawn because there’s no one else to do it, and because I asked him, and because he’s been waiting his whole life for someone to need him for something important. He’s crying before we make it halfway, and I’m crying too, and neither of us cares.
“Don’t trip,” he whispers as we approach the chairs. “I’ll never let you live it down.”
“If I trip, I’m taking you with me.”
“That’s fair.”
Callum is waiting at the end of the aisle that isn’t really an aisle, just a gap between chairs, just a path through the grass. His hands are shaking. I can see them shaking from here.
Olivia stands beside him, holding the rings on a small pillow. She’s concentrating so hard on not dropping them that her tongue is poking out between her teeth. Rabbit is tucked under her arm, supervising.
She drops one of the rings approximately four steps before Danny and I reach them.
“I got it!” she announces, diving for the grass. “I got it, don’t worry, it’s fine, I found it!”
The assembled guests laugh, and Olivia grins up at us, grass-stained and triumphant, and I think: this is what a wedding is supposed to be.
This moment right here. Not the flowers or the dress or the carefully arranged chairs.
This. A kid in a purple dress holding a one-eared rabbit, grinning because she found a ring in the grass.
This is family.
Danny hands me off to Callum with a look that promises violence if anything goes wrong, and takes his seat in the front row, and then it’s just us. Me and Callum and our daughter between us, and the people who love us waiting to see what we’ll say.
“I signed a contract with you,” Callum says, “because I didn’t believe in this.
I stood in a room and told you there was no romance in it, that this was a transaction, that we were two people who needed things from each other and nothing more.
” He takes my hands in his trembling ones.
“I have never been so wrong about anything in my life. And I have been wrong about almost everything.”
“You were pretty wrong about a lot of things,” I agree.
“I was. But I was most wrong about you. I thought I could keep you at arm’s length.
I thought I could maintain control. I thought wanting you was something I could manage, like a portfolio or a business deal.
” He shakes his head. “I had no idea what wanting really meant until I met you. I had no idea what it felt like to want something so much that you’d give up everything else to have it. ”
“You did give up everything else.”
“I’d do it again.” He says it simply, without drama. “Every day. Every hour. I’d burn down every single thing I have if you and Olivia were on the other side of it.”
“That seems excessive.”
“That’s what love is, apparently.” He smiles, and his eyes are wet. “Excessive. Unreasonable. Completely out of control. Everything I spent my whole life avoiding.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t want to avoid it anymore. Now I want to run straight toward it and never look back.
” He lifts our joined hands and presses a kiss to my knuckles.
“I want to wake up next to you for the next fifty years. I want to fight with you about stupid things and make up afterward. I want to watch our daughter grow up and be terrified together when she starts dating. I want to argue over what to order and eat it on the couch and fall asleep in front of bad movies. I want all of it. Every ordinary, boring, wonderful moment of it.”
“You’re setting the bar very low,” I tell him. “Takeout and bad movies.”
“I don’t need the bar to be high. I just need you to be there.”
I’m crying now. I’ve been crying for a while, probably. The tears are running down my face and I don’t care enough to wipe them away because I’m too busy looking at this man who somehow became my whole life while I wasn’t paying attention.
“You never asked me a question,” I tell him.
“That’s the thing you always said you were sorry for.
You took a baby without asking where she came from.
You offered me a contract without asking what I wanted.
You spent years never asking the questions that mattered.
” I squeeze his hands. “So ask me one now. In front of all of them. Ask me the one question you’ve been afraid to ask. ”
He’s quiet for a moment. I can see him thinking, see him sorting through all the questions he’s never let himself voice.
Then he asks it.
“Will you stay?”
Not will you marry me. Not do you love me. Not any of the questions a normal groom would ask at a normal wedding.
Just: will you stay.
Because that’s the question underneath all the others. That’s the fear that’s been living in both of us since the beginning. That someone will leave. That the people we love will disappear. That nothing good ever lasts, because nothing good has ever lasted for either of us before.
“Try and stop me,” I tell him.
He kisses me before the officiant says he can. Nobody seems to mind.
Afterward, the vows are done and the rings are on and we’re officially married with a real wedding.
Danny gets to his feet with a drink in his hand and a grin on his face.
“So here’s the thing about my brother-in-law,” he tells the whole gathering, none of whom are entirely sure what he’s about to say. “He paid for my chemo to get my sister to marry him.”
A ripple of uncertain laughter goes through the crowd.
“And honestly? Worth it.” Danny raises his beer. “To the most expensive brother-in-law in the state of Rhode Island. May he continue to spend ridiculous amounts of money on us for the rest of his natural life.”
Callum laughs so hard he has to set down his champagne glass.
“You’re the worst,” I tell my brother.
“I’m the best. I’m the best and you know it.
” Danny takes a long drink of his beer. “But seriously. This man saved my life. And he gave my sister back her daughter. And he makes them both happy in a way I’ve never seen them happy before.
So even though he’s a rich idiot who can’t be trusted near a stove, I’m glad he’s part of our family. ”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me,” Callum says.
“Don’t get used to it. I’m going back to mocking you tomorrow.”
The reception goes long, the way good parties do.
People dance on the lawn and eat cake and tell stories about the bride and groom, some of which are even true.
Olivia falls asleep on a pile of cushions around eight o’clock and has to be carried to bed by her father, who comes back with grass stains on his suit and a look on his face that I’ve come to recognize as complete contentment.
The last guests leave around ten. Danny is the final holdout, sitting on the back steps with another beer, watching the stars come out over the water.
“You good?” he asks when I come to sit beside him.
“Yeah. I think I am.”
“That’s new.”
“I know.” I lean my head on his shoulder, the way I used to when we were kids and the world was too big and too scary. “Danny, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”
“If you’re pregnant, I’m going to need a minute.”
“I’m not pregnant. At least, I don’t think I am. That’s not the thing.” I take a breath. “I’m going back to school. Nursing school. I re-enrolled last month.”
He goes very still beside me.
“Nic…”
“I know. I know I dropped out. I know I said I’d never go back. But that was before. That was when I thought I had to choose between school and surviving. And now I don’t have to choose anymore, so I want to finish what I started.”
“That’s…” He pulls back to look at me, and his eyes are bright. “That’s amazing. That’s really, really amazing.”
“You’re not mad? That I’m doing it now, when I couldn’t do it then?”
“Why would I be mad?”
“Because I dropped out to take care of you. And now I’m going back because someone else is paying for it. It feels like cheating somehow.”
Danny shakes his head slowly.
“You dropped out to take care of me because you didn’t have a choice.
And now you’re going back because you do have a choice.
” He puts his arm around me and pulls me close.
“That’s not cheating. That’s winning. You survived long enough to get what you deserve, and now you’re taking it. I’m proud of you.”
I cry into his shoulder for a while, because apparently that’s just what I do now at family events, and he holds me and doesn’t say anything stupid for once in his life.
When I finally pull myself together and go back inside, Callum is waiting in the kitchen with two glasses of wine and a look on his face that I’ve come to recognize as love.
“Good talk?” he asks.
“Yeah. I told him about school.”
“How did he take it?”
“Better than I expected.” I take the glass he offers me and lean against the counter. “He said he’s proud of me.”
“He should be. So am I.”
“For going back to school?”
“For all of it.” He sets down his glass and crosses to me, putting his hands on my waist. “For surviving. For coming here. For giving me a second chance when I didn’t deserve one. For choosing me even after everything.”
“You’re going to make me cry again.”
“That’s okay. I’ve gotten used to it.”
I laugh and wipe my eyes and lean into him, letting him hold me up the way I’ve finally learned to let people hold me up.
“Olivia asked me something today,” he says. “Before the ceremony.”
“What?”
“She asked if she was allowed to call you Mom now. Or if there was a rule.”
My heart seizes in my chest. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her there’s no rule.” He pulls back enough to look at my face. “I told her that in this house, we don’t do rules anymore. We do whatever feels right. And if calling you Mom feels right, then that’s what she should do.”
“Callum…”
“She’s been practicing all day. She’s very proud of herself.” He smiles, and it’s the softest thing I’ve ever seen on his face. “She said it feels like a word she’s been waiting her whole life to say.”
I don’t have words for what that does to me. For what it means to hear that my daughter has been waiting her whole life to call me what I’ve been waiting six years to be called.
So I don’t try to find words. I just kiss him, soft and slow, in the kitchen of the house where I walked in as a stranger and somehow became a wife and a mother and a person who belongs.
Outside, the water does what it has always done. The stars come out over the lawn where we got married. And somewhere upstairs, a little girl with a one-eared rabbit sleeps in her purple dress, dreaming about the day she finally got to call me Mom.