Epilogue
Six months later
The invitations went out on cream paper, no return address, because some habits took longer to unlearn than others.
Sienna had laughed when she caught Damian debating the wording with the same flat seriousness he'd once reserved for interrogating a stranger in his study, and he'd only shrugged and said some performances were worth doing properly.
Ashworth House looked different in June.
The gardens Sienna had once found gone wild with neglect now ran riot on purpose — climbing roses over the old stone wall, string lights threaded through the oaks for the evening — and the west wing stood with its windows open for the first time in over a decade, sunlight pouring into rooms that had spent twelve years waiting for someone to decide they were allowed to be lived in again.
Mrs. Voss cried during the vows and denied it fiercely afterward, dabbing at her eyes with the same brisk efficiency she brought to everything else, muttering about pollen in a garden that had none.
Thomas stood near the back in a suit that fit him like it belonged to someone else's life, watching the two of them with an expression Sienna had learned to recognize — not quite peace yet, but something reaching for it, patient and unhurried, the way a man reaches for a thing he isn't sure he's earned.
Damian wore no mask. That, more than the ring or the flowers or the small quiet crowd gathered on the terrace, was the detail Sienna kept returning to all evening — the bare, scarred line of his face turned toward the light without flinching, without calculation, as though he'd finally run out of reasons to hide from a room full of people who already knew exactly what they were looking at.
"You're staring," he murmured, close to her ear, somewhere between the toasts and the first dance.
"I'm allowed to stare. I married you an hour ago."
"So you did." His hand found hers, steady in a way it hadn't always been, in a way she understood now had cost him something to learn. "Any regrets yet?"
"Ask me tomorrow." She smiled against his shoulder, feeling him laugh, quiet and real, the sound still new enough to catch her off guard every time. "I'm told I like keeping you waiting for the good answers."
Later, long after the last guest had gone and the string lights had burned down to a low gold glow over the empty garden, they stood on the same balcony where he'd once opened a small velvet box with an unsteady hand, and Sienna thought — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last — that safety had turned out to be nothing like what she'd expected the night a taxi first carried her up a long dark drive.
It wasn't the absence of danger. It was a man willing to be fully seen anyway, and a house finally, entirely awake.
"Second thoughts?" he asked again, softer this time, watching her the way he always did — like he was still relearning, every day, that he was allowed to.
"None," she said. "Ask me again tomorrow, though. I meant what I said."
"Tomorrow," he agreed, drawing her back inside toward the warm light and the rest of a life neither of them had to hide from anymore. "And every day after it."