Epilogue
Savannah
Sometime in December…
Brayden’s been on the phone all morning, talking quietly in the other room the way he only does with Blake. “You promise you won’t tell them?” he asks. Whatever Blake says in reply gets lost in the other half of the conversation.
After Brayden gets off the phone, he comes back where Asher and I are still in bed. I’m resting because it’s the day after finals—I survived everything and even got a very good analysis from Dr. Ghorbani—and Asher is mostly asleep because it turns out he isn’t a morning person at all.
He rolls over, buries his face in my shoulder. “B, it’s too early for this.”
“You might change your mind when I tell you this.” Brayden taps on his phone, holds up some kind of confirmation.
It takes a second to resolve into words: a trip for three to an incredibly exclusive resort spanning over the next two weeks.
“They’ll let us bring Baby, if you want, or I found someone to watch her. ”
“We can bring her,” I say. “She’s gotta learn how to fly on a private jet sometime.”
Asher, meanwhile, sits up enough that he can take Brayden’s phone and examine the tickets. “Is this just a vacation?”
Brayden shakes his head. “Not just a vacation—I was wondering if you both wanted to marry me.”
I’m not one of those girls who grew up dreaming of my wedding—but not even in my wildest fantasies did I walk down the aisle to meet two grooms. Our officiant is also waiting: Pastor Tim, in his finest rhinestone collar.
“Savannah and Brayden,” he says, “it’s an honor to see you again.”
When Brayden called the Las Vegas chapel to ask for him, Pastor Tim had gotten midway through explaining annulment before Brayden clarified that we were getting married again and adding someone else.
That got Pastor Tim’s laugh and his agreement to do the wedding on the shore of a beautiful white-sand resort.
“Hey, I’m a man of the cloth. Of course I want a free trip to paradise. ”
Now Brayden and Asher are waiting at the altar under a canopy Asher suggested, their hair blown by the light ocean breeze.
Our friends and family are waiting for us too: Victoria and her men; Asher’s mother; Blake and his girlfriend Shira, and Felix, who he introduces as his teammate, then corrects to boyfriend, then corrects to fiancé.
Other people flew down—my classmates, a handful of Peaches, Asher’s friends from Chicago.
I spent so long thinking about how empty the bankruptcy had made my life, that I didn’t appreciate how full it could be if I let it.
I walk down the aisle alone. Victoria offered to escort me. Brayden’s Aunt Myra—the only family member he’s still speaking to other than Blake—offered too. “No, I want to do this myself,” I told both of them.
Victoria hugged me. Myra told me that was wise. “Wouldn’t want that Adler boy getting notions and eloping with me instead.”
Now I walk slowly, not because I’m dreading this but because I’m savoring it.
Remember this, everything in my body tells me.
The salt smell of the air and the roses of my bouquet; the soft rush of waves.
The slight grit of sand under the aisle carpeting, which feels like the only thing keeping me from floating away.
At the altar, I hand my bouquet to Victoria—she’s already crying happily—and stand between Asher and Brayden.
“Now,” Pastor Tim says, “usually I have some conventional words to say here, but this isn’t a conventional wedding, is it?
When I first met Savannah and Brayden, I really hoped they would make it—and I really worried that they wouldn’t.
I could sense they were unbalanced in some ways.
Not a bad fit, just an incomplete one. It’s my honor to stand before them and their friends and loved ones to help them along on their journey.
“So, without further delay, and without objection from the assembled crowd”—he pauses as if daring anyone to say something—“I believe you wanted to make this quick so we could all quote, do the fun part of the wedding and party. Asher, do you take Savannah and Brayden as your spouses and partners?”
“I do,” Asher says, quickly, simply, as if he never doubted it for an instant.
Pastor Tim smiles. His rhinestone collar shimmers in the sunlight. “And you, Brayden?”
“I do. Very much so. Every day.”
“And you, Savannah?”
My nerves, quiet all day, choose that moment to flutter: a handful of butterflies inside me. Not nerves about our wedding, our marriage, our lives together, but the kind of nerves you get from standing on the edge of a great possibility.
Asher looks at me. “Everything good, princess?”
I reach for his hand, for Brayden’s, a current tracing its way through us, connecting us, healing us, binding us together into something greater than ourselves. “I do,” I say. “I really, really do.”
THE END