Chapter 4 Baby, It’s Cold Inside?
BABY, IT'S COLD INSIDE?
KELSEY
The thing nobody tells you about being surprised by your own wedding is that your brain just flat out refuses to process it in real time.
“Run it by me one more time,” I said.
Penny settled deeper into the bus seat beside me, patient in the way that only truly excellent best friends can be patient. “The National B.I.N.G.O. Convention does not exist. Jules made it up so that we could move three hundred wedding guests around Aspen by bus without tipping off the paparazzi.”
“The website looked real.”
“She spent eleven days on that website. The registration form worked and everything.” Penny tilted her head. “If she ever decides she doesn’t want to dig around in people’s minds, she has a very promising future in elaborate fiction.”
“And our guests, the ones who think they’re at a rehearsal dinner right now—“
“Are currently at a wedding rave featuring the stylings of DJ Baby Bokchoi, who took the red eye in from New York City this morning specifically for this.” Penny checked something on her phone. “He’s been described to me as, and I’m quoting here, absolutely going off.”
I looked out the window at the Bear Claw Mountain road winding past. The pines were thick and green on either side. July up here felt nothing like summer anywhere else, cool and clear and smelling like the inside of a snow globe, which was honestly lovely.
“And the bus we’re on right now,” I said.
“The B.I.N.G.O. Tours bus.” Penny paused, in the way she paused when she was about to deliver information she was personally very pleased about. “That stands for Bride Is Not Getting Overwhelmed.”
I stared at her.
“Jules’s idea,” she said.
Of course it was. I thought back to that wrap on the side of the bus that I’d noticed in the parking garage and written off as generic charter company branding.
I thought about the twelve hours of wedding morning chaos and how none of it had felt chaotic, how every moment had been handled before I even noticed it needed handling, and how I had attributed all of that to Ciara Mosely Willingham’s professional excellence, which was real, but apparently had a very effective co-pilot.
Jules Kingman had invented a fake national convention and built a functional registration website to manage the logistics of my secret wedding.
I was so glad she was on my side.
“Pen,” I said. “I don’t really do well with surprises. You know this about me.”
“I do.”
“And yet.”
“And yet.” She took my hand. “He loves you so much, Kels. I have watched this man look at you every single day for the past year and he loves you in the quietest, most certain way I have ever seen. Whatever he has planned today, I promise you it is going to be the best thing you have ever experienced.” She squeezed once. “Trust him.”
The only person I trusted as much as Declan was Penny. If the two of them together were telling me to fall, I believed they would catch me.
“Okay,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I took a breath and let it out. “I trust him.”
Penny smiled. “Good. Now hold still.”
Rose appeared from somewhere at the back of the bus carrying what looked, at first, like a cloud. By the time she reached us it had resolved itself into a layer of diaphanous material that, when she held it up against my dress, made me understand what Declan meant when he’d told me to wait and see.
“Hold out your arms,” Rose said.
I did, and she worked quickly, adjusting and pinning. The overlay settled over my ballgown skirt and the fur wrap went around my shoulders, leading into long sleeves that were, I now noticed, fully lined.
“He didn’t want you to get cold,” Rose said.
“It’s July.”
Penny sang-hummed something from the far end of the chorus of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and went back to her phone.
I ran my fingers over the snowflake beading and tried to get my songwriter brain to stop working for approximately five minutes.
It refused, as it always did. The whole story was right there in the fabric.
He had listened. Every passing comment I’d made about winter, about Christmas, about the way Bear Claw Mountain looked in December when the snow came in over the valley.
He’d been filing it all away, quietly, for exactly this.
That was the thing about Declan. He didn’t talk much. But he listened like it was a competitive sport and he intended to win.
Rose stepped back and handed me my bouquet, white peonies wrapped in a trailing ribbon.
“Ready,” she said.
The bus rolled to a stop.
“Ready,” I agreed, and I was mostly telling myself.
The wedding tent was enormous from the outside and completely translucent, like someone had dropped an oversized snow globe on the side of the mountain and decided to have a wedding in it.
A green carpeted path led from the bus to the entrance, lined with white birch and pine trees, and standing at the end of it were my parents.
And Hayes.
And Wiener the Pooh.
I stopped walking did a double-take, lookin back at my dog for a second.
She was wearing a velvet cape in the exact green of Penny’s dress, trimmed at the collar with white fur that matched my own wrap.
She was harnessed to a tiny sleigh filled with flowers, her little dachshund legs planted like she was fully aware of the responsibility she was carrying and had committed to the bit entirely.
“Where in the world did you find a dachshund-sized sleigh?” I asked.
“Built it.” Hayes rocked back on his heels with the specific satisfaction of a man who had solved a very niche problem extremely well.
“Out of one of our old Tonka trucks. The wheels needed a little engineering but she pulls smooth.” He looked at me and his whole face went soft. “You look beautiful, Kelsey.”
“Thanks, Hayes.” He turned approximately the color of his boutonniere. I loved this man. “So does she.”
Flynn appeared at my elbow out of nowhere, which was a thing Flynn did. He dropped to one knee in front of Pooh and looked her directly in the eye, twin to very small dog. His expression was completely serious.
“Operation Dashing Through the Snow is commencing,” he said. “Just like we practiced. Go find Uncle Gryff. He has the treats.”
Pooh appeared to nod as if she understood that with great cuteness comes great responsibility.
Then she turned, sleigh and all, and trotted down the green carpet and disappeared through the entrance into the dark.
Behind her, petals dropped from beneath the sleigh, leaving a row of flowers for me to walk down.
Aww, my sweet little Pooh was the best flower girl anyone could ever ask for.
We all watched the space where she had been for a minute until Flynn pressed two fingers to his earpiece and then punched the air. “She made it.”
“You’re going to love everything,” Penny said, already heading after Pooh with Flynn leading her down the aisle. “See you at the altar.”
And then it was just me and my parents. My mom was doing the thing she always did in crowds, which was not being quite all the way there, her attention partially somewhere else, somewhere quieter. But she looked at me with so much love that I forgave her for all of it immediately, as I always did.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “You look like you stepped right out of a Housemark movie.”
“Good thing I know how it ends,” I said, and she laughed.
She hugged me quick and careful the way you hug someone in a dress, and then Hayes extended his elbow to her, and they disappeared through the entrance together.
My dad held out his arm to me.
I took it and held on probably a little harder than strictly necessary. He patted my hand the way he had when I was small and scared and pretending I wasn’t.
“From the first time you brought Declan home to meet us,” he said quietly, “I knew. Not because of who he was. Because of how he looked at you when he thought nobody was watching.” He covered my hand with his. “He sees you, Kelsey. The real you. Trust in that today.”
I pressed my lips together, holding back the tremble.
I had written approximately four zillion songs about love. I had a very detailed working theory of what it felt like, what it meant, how it moved through people. And still my dad managed to reduce me to total wordlessness in under thirty seconds. That was a skill. I should take notes.
“Thanks, Dad,” I managed.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Your mom will think I said something dumb.”
I laughed, which was what he intended, and then the music started inside, something low and sweet on a single cello, and we stepped through the entrance into my wedding.
The cold hit me first.
Not unpleasant cold — the kind that sharpened everything, made your senses go up a register.
The air smelled like pine and something clean and wintry, and for a disorienting moment I forgot entirely that we were on a mountain in July, that outside this dome the sun was shining and the wildflowers were out.
Then my eyes adjusted and I forgot everything else entirely.
I had performed on hundreds of stages. I knew what it was to walk into a space that had been designed around an idea, to feel the intention of something bigger than the sum of its parts. But nothing, not one single stage or arena or television set, had ever done this to me.
The dome rose above us, and through it, projected onto the curved ceiling, was the northern lights.
Shifting curtains of green and violet and white, rippling and silent overhead, so convincing that my whole body tilted backward looking for the real sky.
White birch and pine trees lined the short aisle, draped in fairy lights.
The altar was framed in more pine, covered in what looked like real snow, and strung with more light than I could count.
Everything glowed. Everything moved, just slightly, the lights and the faux snow and the shadows of the trees.
Declan was standing at the end of it.