Epilogue
Navy ‘Nay’ Laurent
The ballroom doors were still closed, but nobody standing in that hallway was calm enough to pretend the ceremony hadn’t already started in their heads.
The wedding coordinator kept giving instructions in a low, urgent voice while bridesmaids checked bouquets they had already straightened three times and the groomsmen whispered among themselves about the rings before one of them remembered Lev had refused to trust anybody else with them.
Beyond the doors, the soft pull of a saxophone drifted beneath the string quartet, the two sounds blending together until even the hallway felt wrapped in something elegant and warm.
I stood at the end of it with my arm tucked through Uncle Curtis’s, trying not to breathe too deeply because every time I did, Lulu took it as a sign that something on my dress had shifted.
She had been behind me for the last five minutes smoothing the train, lifting the lace, laying it back down, then starting all over again like the gown might suddenly revolt if she stopped watching it.
“You done touched that dress a hundred times,” I told her, looking over my shoulder.
“And I’ll touch it a hundred more if I need to,” she answered without even glancing up.
“It ain’t going nowhere.”
“I know that.” She pressed one palm over the lace anyway, making sure it lay flat. “That don’t mean I’m fixing to let you walk out there looking any kind of way.”
Uncle Curtis chuckled beside me. “Leave her alone. She been waiting on this day longer than you have.”
“That’s probably true,” I admitted.
Lulu finally stepped back, but only far enough to inspect the entire back of the dress with narrowed eyes.
Once she decided it met her approval, she nodded to herself and moved around to my side.
Her hands were trembling just enough for me to notice, though she tried hiding it by clasping them together in front of her.
Uncle Curtis gave my arm a light squeeze. “You nervous?”
I took a second before answering because I wanted to tell him the truth.
I had been nervous upstairs. Nervous while getting dressed, nervous while fastening my prosthetic and checking the fit twice even though I already knew it was right.
I was nervous when the photographer asked me to stand near the window and smile like my heart wasn’t beating against my ribs.
But standing there now, with the doors separating me from the man waiting on the other side, all of that had soothed something inside of me.
“I was,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“What changed?”
My eyes moved toward the closed doors, and a smile touched my mouth before I could stop it. “I remembered who’s waiting for me.”
That was all I needed to say. Uncle Curtis nodded like he understood, and Lulu pressed her lips together, probably to keep herself from crying before the ceremony even started.
A few feet away, the wedding coordinator lifted one finger toward the musicians.
The sound beyond the doors shifted, the saxophone fading beneath a slower arrangement, and the hallway went still.
“They’re ready,” she whispered.
The double doors opened and the light poured into the hallway first, bright enough that I had to blink before the room came into focus.
Then the details made me blush. White roses climbed the ends of every row and spilled from tall arrangements that lined the aisle.
Hundreds of candles flickered in glass cylinders as their flames reflected off the polished floor.
Through the wall of windows behind the altar, the water was glowing where the sun touched it.
For a few seconds, all I could do was stand there.
Every person who had helped carry me through the worst year of my life seemed to be seated in that room.
My former nurse manager was near the front beside two women from the emergency department, and all three of them smiled the second they saw me.
Then my eyes found BJ. She sat in the front row wearing deep plum, one hand curled around a handkerchief while the other rested against her chest. Losing Marv had left a sorrow in her that time had softened but never erased.
It was still there in the corners of her eyes, living beside the happiness on her face instead of replacing it.
That was something all of us had learned by then.
Grief didn’t always leave when joy arrived.
Sometimes they sat beside each other and made room.
I looked beyond her, and there he was. Lev stood beneath the floral arch in a black tuxedo cut so perfectly against his body that I knew it had cost more than he would ever admit.
His shoulders were squared, his hands folded in front of him, and from a distance he looked composed enough to fool anybody who didn’t know him, but I knew him.
I saw the way his throat moved when he swallowed.
I saw his fingers tighten around each other.
I saw his breathing change when he laid eyes on me.
He didn’t look anywhere else after that. Uncle Curtis leaned closer without taking his eyes off the altar. “I think you broke him.”
I smiled, still watching Lev. “Good.”
The officiant said something to the guests, but the words passed through the room without reaching me. Uncle Curtis and I stepped forward together, and the first click of my heel against the aisle runner sounded louder in my head than the music.
Months earlier, walking had required concentration so complete that I couldn’t hold a conversation while doing it.
Every step came with instructions. Now, as I moved toward Lev, none of them entered my mind.
I wasn’t measuring the distance between each step or wondering whether the fabric of my dress revealed too much of my leg.
I wasn’t searching the guests’ faces to see who might be staring. The only face I saw was his.
Halfway down the aisle, Lev rubbed beneath his nose and looked away for barely a second, trying to hide the fact that his eyes had filled with water.
Mike leaned toward him and said something that made one of the other groomsmen laugh, but Lev didn’t respond.
He just looked back at me, with his expression shifting the closer I came.
There was no pity in it and no sadness. What I saw on his face was something deeper than either of those, it was gratitude, like he was remembering the parking lot without allowing it to take this moment away from us.
Like he could still see the blood on my clothes, still hear the doctors explaining what they couldn’t save, still feel every morning he had stood beside me in rehab and refused to let me decide I was finished.
But now I was walking toward him, not the way I had before, and not with the body I had before.
Still, I was walking toward him, and the look in his eyes made me understand that this meant as much to him as it did to me.
When we reached the altar, Uncle Curtis turned toward me and kissed my forehead.
His lips lingered there for a second before he took my hand and placed it into Lev’s.
Lev closed his fingers around mine immediately, holding on with the kind of quiet certainty that had become one of the safest things in my life.
“You okay?” he asked under his breath.
I looked at the moisture still gathered in his eyes. “You the one up here crying.”
“I didn’t cry”
“You absolutely cried.”
He frowned slightly. “Had something in my eye.”
“I watched the tear come out.”
He tried to fight a smile and winked at me. “There she go.”
“What?”
“My wife.”
I squeezed his hand. “Not yet.” I winked back.
He nodded his head. “Give it five minutes.”
The officiant smiled like he had heard us but was polite enough not to interrupt.
Once Uncle Curtis took his seat, the ceremony began, and for a while I tried to listen to every word about love, commitment, partnership, and grace.
The promises we were supposed to make when life felt easy and keep when it didn’t.
I heard them, but they seemed to float around us because everything they meant was already standing in front of me.
When the officiant announced it was time for our vows, Lev reached inside his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He looked down at it for a moment, unfolded it halfway, then shook his head and slipped it back into his pocket.
“I can’t read that,” he said.
A ripple of low laughter filled the room. BJ raised one eyebrow from the front row. “You better say something.”
Lev glanced at her. “See? This exactly why I wrote it. Grandma been threatening me all week.”
“I surely did.”
He smiled before turning back to me. Whatever humor had been in his face softened when he took both my hands into his. “But none of what I wrote sounded like me,” he said. “So I’m just gone tell you the truth.”
The room quieted around us. “I can’t promise you life always gone be easy.
We know better than that already. I can’t promise bad days won’t come, or people won’t disappoint us, because they will.
We have both learned that the hard way.” His thumbs moved slowly over my knuckles while he spoke, grounding me the same way he always did.
“But I can promise you that the next time life gets ugly, you won’t have to stand in it by yourself. ”
My eyes burned before he even paused and then continued. “Eleven days,” he continued, with that deep gaze. “That’s all it took to change my whole damn life. I thought I was helping somebody settle a debt. Thought I was handling one more problem and going back to my business.”
A few people laughed quietly, but Lev never looked away from me. “Turned out God was introducing me to my wife.”
The first tear slipped free before I could stop it.
“You spent a long time thinking losing your leg changed who you were,” he said. “It didn’t. It changed how you had to move through this world, but it never touched the woman you are. You still the strongest woman I know, still the prettiest woman I know, still stubborn as hell.”
That got a louder laugh from the guests, and I gave him a look through my tears.
He grinned. “And starting today, you officially my headache for the rest of my life.”
“What a beautiful vow,” I whispered dabbing my eyes trying not to ruin my mascara.
He lifted my hand and pressed his lips against my fingers, just above where my wedding band would soon rest. The gesture was simple, but it carried everything he didn’t know how to make sound pretty.
The officiant turned toward me. “Navy?”
I looked at Lev and realized the speech I had practiced in the mirror no longer fit the moment either. It had been polished and careful, full of lines I thought I was supposed to say. Standing there with him, I didn’t want polished, I wanted honest. “I had a whole speech too,” I admitted.
“I know that you’ve been practicing when you thought I was asleep.”
My mouth fell open. “You heard me?”
“Every word.”
“Then why you let me keep embarrassing myself?”
“Because it was cute.”
The guests laughed again, and I shook my head before tightening my fingers around his. “The best thing that ever happened to me came into my life completely uninvited,” I began. “I wasn’t looking for you. I definitely wasn’t praying for anybody like you.”
Lev nodded. “That part I believe.”
“But every time I tried to push you away, you stayed and not in a way that made me feel trapped. You stayed close enough for me to know I wasn’t alone, but far enough to let me decide when I was ready.
” I looked down at our hands, remembering all the versions of myself he had stood beside without asking me to hurry and become somebody easier to love after my trauma.
“When I hated what I saw in the mirror, you loved me enough for both of us until I figured out how to love myself again. You never asked me to become the woman I was before everything happened. You never treated me like the best parts of me had been left in that parking lot.”
Lev’s expression changed, and I knew he was fighting his emotions again.
“You simply loved the woman standing in front of you,” I said.
“So today, I promise to love you with that same patience. I promise to stand beside you when life gets ugly and remind you that you don’t have to carry everything by yourself either.
And I promise to spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret choosing me. ”
For a moment, the room was completely still and then the officiant smiled and moved us through the exchange of rings.
Lev slid mine onto my finger slowly as his eyes dropped to watch the band beside my engagement ring.
When it was my turn, I had to guide his ring over the last knuckle because he kept watching me instead of his own hand.
“By the authority vested in me,” the officiant began, his voice carrying across the ballroom, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Lev’s hand was already moving toward my waist before the officiant finished.
“You may kiss your bride.”
He pulled me into him with one arm secure around my back while his other hand cradled my face.
The kiss wasn’t rushed or performed for the room.
It felt like every promise we had made before reaching that altar, the ones spoken in hospital rooms and parked cars and quiet bedrooms when neither of us knew what came next.
He kissed me with the certainty of a man who had already decided forever long before anybody gave him permission.
Applause burst through the ballroom. Someone tossed petals into the air. BJ cried openly without bothering to hide it, while Lulu wrapped both arms around Monica so tightly they nearly stumbled into the row behind them. Mike’s voice rose over everybody else.
“My dawg finally did it!”
Lev smiled against my mouth before resting his forehead against mine. His eyes lowered to the wedding band on my finger before finding mine again. The smile that spread across his face was proud, and so full of love that it made my chest ache.
“Mhm,” he said, pulling me a little closer. “I’m just your husband now.”
I flashed my ring proudly. “For life,” I cooed.