28. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
Then, Six Years Ago
The doors of the church are about to open.
I’m standing in the vestibule in a dress that costs more than my mother made in six months, my hands shaking around my bouquet, my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Any moment now, those doors will swing wide and I’ll walk toward the man I love while two hundred people watch and judge and wonder what he sees in the library girl with the secondhand earrings.
“You’re shaking,” my mother says.
“I’m aware.”
“Like a leaf in a hurricane.” She adjusts my veil with hands that are perfectly steady, because Marie Holland has never been nervous a day in her life. “Do you want to sit down?”
Her hands are rough at the fingertips - three jobs’ worth of rough, a lifetime of jar lids and library paste - and they move through the tulle with the confidence of a woman who has fixed everything she has ever been handed. She anchors a pin. Tests it. Anchors another.
Through the vestibule floor I can feel the organ more than hear it, a vibration coming up through my borrowed shoes, two hundred people breathing on the other side of a door.
“If I sit down in this dress, I’ll never get back up.”
“Fair point.” She steps back to look at me, and her eyes are wet. “You look like a princess.”
“I look like a fraud.”
“You look like my daughter.” She takes both my hands in hers, bouquet and all. “And my daughter is not a fraud. My daughter is the smartest, bravest, most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and she’s about to marry a man who doesn’t deserve her.”
“Mom-”
“Nobody deserves you.” Her voice cracks. “That’s not an insult to him. It’s just the truth. You’re too good for everyone. You’ve been too good for everyone since you were six years old and told off that boy who was pulling wings off butterflies.”
“I was seven. And he cried.”
“He deserved to cry. Those were monarch butterflies.” She squeezes my hands. “My point is, you’ve never been afraid to stand up for what matters. You’ve never backed down from a fight. And you’ve never, ever let anyone make you feel small.”
Her mouth is fighting a smile and losing. This is the mother I know - grief and comedy in the same breath, a woman who buried a husband and raised a daughter and still files butterflies as admissible evidence at a wedding.
“His mother makes me feel small.”
“His mother is terrified of you.”
She takes my chin in two fingers, jeweler-precise, and tips my face up like she’s checking a setting.
I laugh, and it comes out wrong. “Eleanor Dean has never been terrified of anything.”
“She’s terrified of you,” my mother repeats.
“Because you’re the one thing she can’t control.
You didn’t grow up in her world, you don’t owe her anything, and you love her son in a way that has nothing to do with his money or his name or his family’s foundation.
” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
“That’s power, baby girl. Real power. The kind that can’t be bought. ”
“I don’t feel powerful.”
“Nobody does, on their wedding day. That’s what makes it terrifying.” She glances at the doors. “But you’re not walking through those doors because you feel ready. You’re walking through because you love him, and love is supposed to be terrifying.”
She fusses with the veil one last time, then gives up fussing and just looks at me, the way she used to look at the last jar of the season before she labeled it.
“Walk slowly,” she says. “Down the aisle. Slower than feels right. Make all of them wait for you.” Her mouth curves. “The Deans have never once waited for anything. It’ll be educational.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not supposed to be comforting. It’s supposed to be true.
” She presses her forehead to mine, the way she used to when I was small and scared and needed her to make the world make sense.
“I’m going to go sit down now. And when those doors open, I want you to look at that man and remember something. ”
“What?”
“He’s the lucky one.” She pulls back, eyes fierce. “He’s the lucky one, Juliette. Don’t you ever forget it.”
She walks toward the side door that leads to the pews, and I’m alone in the vestibule with my shaking hands and my too-expensive dress and the sudden, overwhelming certainty that I’m about to change my life forever.
The organ music shifts.
My mother steps back. Squares me like a painting. Then she leans in one last time, quick, and presses her lips to my forehead - thimble-rough hands on both my shoulders, chamomile and hairspray and thirty years of her - and whatever she prays into my hairline stays between her and the vestibule.
She was gone by that October. I didn’t know that then. Neither did she. We just had the doors, and the organ, and the last thing she ever armed me with: he’s the lucky one.
The doors begin to open.
And there he is.
Zachary Dean, standing at the end of the aisle in a suit that fits him like it was sewn onto his body, his face doing something I’ve never seen before. His eyes find mine across the length of the church, and his mouth moves.
He’s saying something.
Mouthing words I can’t quite make out, something private in the middle of this very public moment, something meant only for me.
I walk toward him without knowing what he said.
I marry him without asking.
I wonder about it for years.
Now
The cottage is quiet.
No storm outside, no fire down the road, no crisis requiring immediate action. Just two people standing in a kitchen that smells like coffee and old wood and the last breath of my mother’s lavender.
“You’re staring at me,” he says.
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“About whether I’m ready to say what I came here to say.”
He sets down the coffee cup he’s been holding. Leans against the counter. Waits.
He’s learned to wait. That’s different. That’s new.
“I’m saying yes.”
He goes very still.
“Yes to what?”
“To this.” I gesture between us, at the space that’s somehow gotten smaller in the last few minutes. “To trying. To the whole ruinous project of loving you again on purpose.”
He hasn’t moved. That’s the discipline of him now - coffee cup down, hands open at his sides, a man being very careful not to lunge at the thing he’s wanted for months. Only his breathing gives him away, and the white line of his knuckles where they’ve found the counter behind him.
“Juliette-”
“I’m not done.” I hold up a hand. “I need you to understand what I’m agreeing to.
I’m not saying yes because you gave a speech at the tree lighting.
I’m not saying yes because you stood up to your mother or walked away from your inheritance or did any of the dramatic things you’ve done in the last twenty-four hours. ”
“Then why?”
“Because you stopped.”
He blinks. “What?”
“When I asked you to stop - the bookmarks, the shop visits, all of it - you stopped. Completely. You gave me exactly what I asked for, even though it was the opposite of what you wanted.” I take a step closer.
“That’s how I know you’ve changed. Not because you’re capable of grand gestures, but because you’re capable of small ones.
Of listening. Of letting me set the terms.”
“I would have stopped forever if you needed me to.”
“I know.” Another step. “That’s why I don’t need you to anymore.”
He reaches for me then, his hands finding my waist, and I let him pull me close because I’ve been holding myself away from him for so long and I’m tired. The solid warmth of his body seeps through my clothes.
“I love you,” he says against my hair, voice low and rough with everything we haven’t said yet. “I’ve loved you for years. I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you know it.”
His fingers flex against my sides, thumbs brushing the soft skin just under the hem of my shirt, and the simple touch sends a slow shiver rolling up my spine. My throat tightens around all the years I spent pretending I didn’t ache for exactly this.
“Bold promise for a man who’s currently homeless,” I murmur, tipping my head back just enough to see the corner of his mouth twitch.
He laughs, and the vibration runs straight through my chest, loosening a knot behind my ribs I’d stopped noticing. “I’m not homeless. I have a couch.”
“You have temporary couch privileges.” I poke a finger into his sternum, but I don’t step away. “Subject to revocation.”
Zachary’s eyes darken with amusement and something hungrier. His hands slide lower, settling at the curve of my hips, fingertips tracing slow shapes that make it hard to think. “What are the terms of maintaining couch privileges?”
“Don’t leave wet towels on the floor.” My voice comes out breathier than I intend when his thumbs stroke along the waistband of my jeans. “Don’t eat my leftover pizza. Don’t-”
He kisses me.
It’s not like the kisses before, the ones that felt like negotiations, like tests, like arguments conducted in a different language.
This one is simple. Honest. A statement of intent.
His mouth is warm and sure, lips parting mine with a soft sound that punches the air from my lungs.
Oh, I think. There you are. Heat unfurls low in my belly, slow and inevitable, as his tongue brushes mine.
“I accept your terms,” he murmurs against my mouth, not pulling away far enough for the words to feel like anything but another kiss.
“I haven’t finished listing them.” I fist the front of his shirt, holding him close while my free hand slides up the back of his neck into his hair. The strands are soft between my fingers. My heart is hammering so hard I’m sure he can feel it.
“I accept them anyway.” He pulls back just far enough to look at me, foreheads nearly touching, breath mingling. His gaze drops to my mouth and lingers like a touch. “Whatever you need. Whatever you want. Whatever makes this work.”
“That’s a dangerous amount of power to give someone.” The words come out shaky because his hands have slipped under my shirt now, palms spanning my bare waist, rough and hot against my skin.