Epilogue 1 #2
The reception is in a glass-walled pavilion overlooking the lake. The sun is going down. The light is gold and pink. The tables are set with flowers and candles and the kind of China that makes you eat more carefully.
I dance with Nora. Not well—I haven’t improved since Aurum, and the tempo situation remains adversarial—but she doesn’t care, and I don’t care, and we move together in the approximate direction of rhythm while the music plays, our friends dance around us, and the lake turns gold beyond the glass.
“We should do this,” she says, her head against my shoulder.
“Dance?”
“Get married. Like this. Not as big and ridiculous. But in the spring with all the flowers and the lake as a backdrop.”
“I thought you wanted small.”
“I thought I wanted small. Then I watched Layla walk down that aisle and Bennett’s face did the thing and Michaela rated the ceremony like a figure-skating judge, and I thought—I want that.
I want the big room and the stupid dress and every single person we love watching us promise each other forever. ”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“You don’t have to agree that fast. We can think about it. Talk more.”
“I don’t need to think. I just want you to be my wife,” I say, and I stop pretending there’s a room full of people around us.
I tip Nora’s chin up and kiss her.
It’s not a discreet peck for public consumption.
It’s warm and sure and a little deeper than is probably appropriate at someone else’s wedding, but I’ve reached the stage of my life where appropriate has lost a lot of its authority over me.
Nora makes that soft, surprised sound into my mouth she always makes when I catch her off guard, and then she’s kissing me back, one hand sliding up into my hair while the other stays linked with mine at my shoulder.
When I pull away, her eyes are bright and her lips are curved.
“Well,” she says softly. “That felt like a binding verbal agreement.”
“I was accepting your terms.”
“Without review by counsel?”
“I’m trying a new thing where I occasionally act on instinct.”
“That’s very reckless of you, Mr. Kingsley.”
“It’s your influence.”
Michaela appears at my elbow. “That was a lot,” she says.
Nora coughs a laugh and presses her forehead briefly to my shoulder. “Hello to you too, bug.”
“I’m not criticizing,” Michaela says. “I’m simply noting that if you’re going to do dramatic public romance, I need warning so I can position myself for optimal emotional impact.”
“Were you not already doing that?” I ask.
“I’m always doing that,” she says. “But still.”
She skips off.
Nora laughs into my shoulder. I hold her tighter. The song changes. We don’t.
Across the dance floor, I spot something that makes me pause.
Jenna is dancing with Dominic.
It’s not the reluctant, arm’s-length, I’m-here-under-protest dancing of two people stuck in the bridal party together. This is actual dancing. Close. Her hand on his shoulder. His hand on her waist. They’re talking—heads close, voices low—and Jenna is smiling. All the way to her eyes.
Dominic says something. She laughs—head thrown back, unguarded, a sound I’ve never heard from Jenna Pemberton in years of knowing her. Dominic’s face is the face of a man who has been working toward a single moment for longer than he’ll admit and has just felt it arrive.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I murmur against Nora’s ear.
“Are you talking about Jenna and Dominic?”
“Yeah. She’s laughing at something Dominic said. In public. Without irony.”
“She’s been doing it all night. Did you notice at dinner? She sat next to him voluntarily. The seating chart had them apart. She moved the place cards.”
“Well, I’m shocked.”
“Remember at Layla’s birthday party you said it’d be days before they got together?”
I watch them. Dominic’s thumb traces a small circle on Jenna’s waist. She doesn’t move away. She leans closer. The distance between them shrinking.
“I was obviously wrong.”
“You were close. Just weeks instead of days—if they can finally stop pretending, of course.”
I think about Dominic—the man who bought furniture for my office and hired staff through Jenna and orchestrated a meeting with Thomas Canning at a whiskey bar and who has been, for years, the most patient man I know about the one thing he wants most.
“I think they’ve already stopped,” I say. “They just haven’t told anyone yet.”
“Including each other?”
“Especially each other.”
Nora smiles against my shoulder. “They’ll figure it out.”
“They will.”
“Everyone does eventually.”
“Some of us just need a longer runway.”
She lifts her head and looks at me. The light catches her face—amber and gold, the same light from Aurum, from the courthouse steps, from every moment I looked at this woman and understood that the life I’d built to survive in was too small for what she was offering.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too.”
“Michaela is eating her third piece of cake.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you going to stop her?”
“Absolutely not. It’s a wedding. Cake consumption is unregulated at weddings.”
“That’s a bold legal position.”
“I’m a bold lawyer.”
Across the pavilion, Michaela has indeed secured a third slice. She catches me watching and lifts her fork in a salute.
I wave back.
My daughter. My fiancée. My friends. The lake going dark beyond the glass. The music playing. The room full of people who have survived their own love stories and shown up tonight to celebrate someone else’s.
Dominic’s hand on Jenna’s waist. Jenna’s smile. The beginning of something inevitable, already in motion.
Bennett and Layla on the dance floor, married, laughing, holding each other the way people hold things they’ve fought for.
And here, a man who spent seven years convincing himself solitude was safety, watching his daughter eat dessert while his fiancée dances in his arms with her head on his shoulder. Perfection.
“Good wedding.”
“Great wedding.”
“Ours will be better.”
“Obviously.”
“Michaela’s already started a brief.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”