Epilogue
EVERETT
She has refused the chair four times.
I know this because I've been counting, and because the chair cost eleven hundred dollars and was specifically selected by Everly for lumbar support and I carried it in from the car myself, which is not something I typically do at art galleries but is apparently something I do now for my nine-and-a-half-months-pregnant wife who will not sit down.
"I'm fine," Aria says without looking at me, adjusting a frame that does not need adjusting.
"You've been on your feet for three hours."
"I'm aware of what my feet are doing."
"Your ankles aren't. They’re swelling to almost double the size."
She turns. Gives me a look that says, in no uncertain terms, that what I just blurted out could very well end in her stabbing me in the neck with a paint brush.
"Everett. If you mention my ankles one more time, I will hang you next to the watercolors."
Zayne, walks up next to me with a glass of wine, "I bet she couldn't even pay someone to take you away. Not even worth her time."
"Helpful," I tell him.
"I thought so."
The gallery is full tonight with people who came because they wanted to see Aria's work and not because a Kauffman was attached to the invitation.
This is the Bellweather Gallery.
The same gallery where Aria showed her first piece four years ago. The same gallery her parents left the night of the accident. I know what it cost her to walk through the doors tonight.
Her father's idea. Henry insisted she come back here.
Not to forget, he told her but to prove the place doesn't get to own that night forever.
That her mother would never have wanted this for her.
Instead, he suggested that she used the showing as a way to heal and to let go of the past before the baby gets here.
He's here now. Second row from the front, seated in the chair Aria won't use, looking better than he has in over a year. He’s clearer now… steadier. I don’t have to remind him who I am every other time we come to visit.
He’s three weeks from moving into the east wing of the estate, which Everly has already redecorated twice and will probably redo a third time to keep from begging Aria to let her redecorate the nursery, yet again.
Henry is looking at the painting.
The one from that night. Aria rehung it—center wall, gallery-lit, the focal point of the entire show. Beside it, four new pieces. All of them painted in Cannes, all of them tied to her mother in ways I don't fully understand but feel anyway.
The whole collection is titled A Mother Loves.
I'm not an art person. But these stop me every time I walk past them. Something in the color. Something in the way the light moves.
My family showed up.
All of them except for Levi and Christian who had to make an emergency flight to Las Vegas for a deal that went bad on our father a month before he passed. A vendetta that Levi’s been trying to rectify, even though he should be finding a bride to marry.
Aria finishes adjusting the frame that didn't need adjusting and moves to the next cluster of guests.
I watch her work the room—thanking people, answering questions about her process, laughing at something someone says about the light in the Cannes pieces—and the ring in my jacket pocket feels like it weighs forty pounds.
It's been in there for three weeks.
Custom cut. Princess setting. Not the ring from the contract—that one is still on her finger, and she's never taken it off, and I've never asked her to. This one is different. This one I chose because I wanted to, not because a trust document required it.
Everly's voice has been in my head for approximately twenty-one days straight.
You're going to regret not getting on one knee. Mark my words.
She said that to me the morning of the contract signing, and she's brought it up no fewer than six times since, most recently yesterday when she cornered me in the kitchen and said, "You are going to do this properly or I will never forgive you and I will also tell the baby."
The baby is not born yet but Everly does not care. Her threat sticks.
I reach into my pocket and touch the box. My hand is steady… mostly anyway.
The crowd is thinning now. It's after nine. The catering staff has started collecting glasses and dimming the lights by a fraction.
Aria is standing in front of A Mother Loves.
Alone, for the first time all night. One hand on her belly. The other at her side.
Henry is watching her from his chair, and the look on his face is something I don't have words for. I look away because that's not mine to see.
I cross the room.
She hears me coming. Doesn't turn.
"You're going to tell me to sit down," she says.
"I wasn't."
"Liar."
"I was going to tell you something else."
She turns. Looks up at me.
"What?"
I take her hand.
Her brow furrows.
"Everett—"
I go down on one knee.
The gallery doesn't go quiet all at once. It happens in a wave—first the people closest to us, then the ones by the champagne, then Everly, whose gasp is loud enough to qualify as a sound effect.
Aria stares down at me.
"What are you doing?" she whispers.
"Something I should have done the first time."
I pull the box from my pocket. Open it. It’s the wedding band to go with the ring that I gave her all those months ago.
Aria’s hand stretches over her heart immediately. She wasn’t expecting this.
"Ten months ago, you agreed to marry a man you could barely stand.
A man who wouldn't tell you his coffee order to keep you at arm's length and fired you when he knew he was losing the battle to keep his distance.
You married me for a trust document and to protect your father.
There was never anything in it for you," I say.
"And then somehow, miraculously, I did something right in my life and I convinced you to fall in love with me, though I didn't deserve it. And now I’m kneeling in front of you in this art gallery, in front of our family and friends, because Everly was right when she said that I would regret the way I didn’t get down on one knee and proposed all those months ago.
She was right. I should have done all of this the right way. From the beginning."
A wet, broken laugh comes out of Aria.
Somewhere behind me, Everly whisper-shouts, "I KNEW IT."
I look up at my wife. My hand isn't shaking. My voice is.
"Marry me again," I say. "Not because we have to.
Because I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I want you to know that I chose this.
I chose you, and I want you to get the chance to choose me too.
A chance to choose every version of us that's coming—the good, the difficult, the part where we share pistachio ice cream because the bird took one of ours. "
Aria chuckles.
"The engagement ring was the contract and now this infinitely ring represents us choosing forever. Both decisions shape us. Will you do this with me? Will you agree to forever?"
She laughs again. Tears now. She doesn't wipe them.
"Yes," she says. "Obviously yes."
I slide the ring on beside the first one. Two bands on one finger. The contract and the choice.
When I stand, she pulls me down and kisses me, and the gallery applauds, and Zayne whistles so loudly that Wes says, "For the love of God," and Henry is crying in his chair and not hiding it, and Everly has her phone out already which means this will be everywhere by morning and I don't care.
I don't care about any of it. Just her.
Aria pulls back, face flushed, eyes bright, and opens her mouth to say something.
Then she stops. I feel it before I understand what just happened. My shoes are soaked.
We both look down at the same time.
"Everett."
"Please tell me that’s from a water bottle."
She shakes her head. "My water just broke."
Fuck. We have to go. Now.
Within ninety seconds of Aria's water breaking, Zayne has the car pulled around, Everly had already packed the hospital bag earlier this week—which she apparently put in the trunk this morning "just in case, don't argue with me"—and Colston has somehow gotten Henry to the SUV faster than should be physically possible for a man assisting someone who uses a cane.
Wes holds the gallery door open, so that we can all exit quickly and safely, while staying behind to make sure the logistics of helping the curator manage the crowd is taken care of. Managing chaos is where the man thrives.
The labor took eight hours which I spent most of them trying to keep her comfortable, because there is nothing that makes me feel less in control than not being able to take away my wife's pain.
Aria was extraordinary.
Aria is always extraordinary, but this was different.
This was my wife, gripping my hand hard enough to grind bone, looking me dead in the eye, needing me to remind her that she was doing good, that I was proud of her, that the baby was almost there and to take a deep breath and push.
I was the only thing I knew how to be in that moment. The best coach that the Lamaze class taught me to be.
Then… before I could even wrap my head around it, our daughter arrives.
She's small. Impossibly small. Red-faced and furious and screaming with conviction, but she settles in the only place she feels the safest… against Aria's chest and the entire world goes quiet.
There’s tears in Aria’s eyes—tears in mine too. I've never been more proud of my wife.
"Hi," she whispers to our daughter. "Hi sweet girl. We've been waiting for you."
I stand there with one hand on Aria's shoulder, watching my daughter's tiny fingers curl around nothing.
"Do you want to hold her?" Aria asks.
I’ve been waiting months for this. To hold our daughter and tell her that she’ll always have me. That my love will never be conditional. "Yes." I nod.
The nurse guides the transfer. I take her—too carefully, hands too big, everything about me suddenly wrong for something this small, and yet she settles against my chest.
She's warm. Her eyes aren't open yet. Her hand flexes once against my shirt.
My daughter… Ours.
"You okay?" Aria asks, looking up at me with an exhaustion so deep it's almost peaceful.
I try to answer but nothing comes out.
I nod once instead, because my throat is full of emotion that makes it hard to speak at the moment.
I sit down in the chair beside the bed—the chair I've been trying to get my wife to use for months—and hold my daughter against my chest and listen to her breathe.
Aria's hand finds my forearm and rests it there.
"She has your frown," she teases.
I look down at my daughter's face. The tiny furrow between her brows. The expression that tells me she’s already passed judgment on the new world she just entered into… and she’s probably right.
"That's not a frown," I say. "She got her daddy’s focus."
Aria laughs softly. "Whatever you say."
I press my lips to the top of my daughter's head.
Aria leans her head back against the pillow and closes her eyes.
"Everett?"
"Hmm."
"I'm glad you got on one knee."
The corner of my mouth pulls up.
"Everly will never let me forget it."
"She's already texted me seventeen times." Aria's eyes stay closed. "The last one just says I TOLD HIM SO in all caps."
I look at my wife. My daughter and then I close my eyes, hold my daughter a little tighter, and let the rest of it go.
I’ve never needed the inheritance, or the penthouse, or the estate. All this time, all I ever needed was them.
This is home.
Thank you for reading The Marriage Clause!