20. Ursula
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Ursula
The following spring, I wake up on my wedding day at Matteo’s lighthouse, and I throw up.
The bathroom floor is cold against my knees. The porcelain toilet is cold against my forehead. Outside, I can hear the sea crashing against the rocks, the same sound that lulled me to sleep last night, the same sound that will soundtrack my wedding in approximately six hours.
This is not how I imagined this day starting.
I’ve been telling myself it’s nerves. For the past two weeks, every time my stomach lurched at the smell of coffee or the sight of eggs, I told myself it was pre-wedding anxiety.
Every time I fell asleep at eight o’clock, I blamed it on the planning.
Every time my breasts ached, I convinced myself it was a new bra.
I’m very good at lying to myself. I’ve had thirteen years of practice.
But kneeling on this bathroom floor, watching the sun rise through the window, I can’t lie anymore.
The test is in my bag.
I bought it three days ago, in a pharmacy two towns over where no one would recognize me. I’ve been carrying it around like a grenade, afraid to pull the pin, afraid of what happens when it explodes.
I stand up. Rinse my mouth. Splash water on my face.
In the mirror, I look like a woman about to get married. My hair is still in last night’s braid. My face is pale and a little green around the edges. My mother’s signet ring glints on my right hand, where it’s been since Renata dropped it on my chest a lifetime ago.
I look like my mother.
The realization hits me hard. I’ve seen photographs of her at my age, and the resemblance has always been there, but it’s never felt as strong as it does right now. The same cheekbones. The same green eyes. The same stubborn jaw.
She was pregnant with me when she was my age.
I dig the test out of my bag. Read the instructions even though I already know them by heart. Follow each step with the precision of a woman who has learned that some things can’t be rushed.
Two minutes.
I sit on the edge of the tub and stare at the lighthouse walls, these walls Matteo rebuilt with his own hands, this place where we first made love, where he’s proposed to me twice more since that night in the boat, where in six hours we’re going to stand in front of everyone we love and promise each other forever.
Two lines.
I’m pregnant.
Pregnant on my wedding day, in the lighthouse where my life started over, and I’m going to marry a man who doesn’t know yet, who has no idea that forever just got a lot more complicated.
I should tell him. Right now, before any of this goes any further. I should walk down to wherever he is and say “Matteo, we need to talk” and watch his face when I tell him that the life we’re building is already growing inside me.
But I don’t want to.
I want this day to be about us. About the wedding we planned, the vows we wrote, the future we’re choosing together. I want to marry him because we love each other, not because there’s a baby involved. I want to give him this day, this perfect day, and then I’ll give him the rest of our lives.
Tonight.
I’ll tell him tonight.
I hide the test in my bag, brush my teeth again, and go downstairs to start becoming a bride.
***
The lighthouse has been transformed.
Isla and Lucia arrived yesterday with a team of florists and turned the rocky point into something out of a dream.
White orchids cascade from driftwood arches.
Ribbons flutter in the sea breeze. Chairs arranged in neat rows face the gallery deck, where Matteo and I will stand with the Atlantic at our backs.
It’s nothing like my first wedding. That was a cathedral and a crush of guests and a dress that weighed more than I did. This is small, intimate, real.
This is what love actually looks like.
“You’re glowing.” Dayana appears beside me, already in her sage green dress, her eyes suspiciously bright. “Are brides supposed to glow this much?”
“I slept well.”
“Liar.” She takes my hand. “I’ve known you for ten years, Ursula. I know when you’re hiding something.”
For a moment, I almost tell her. The secret is sitting on my tongue, waiting to be released. But this is Matteo’s news too. He deserves to hear it first.
“I’m just happy.” It’s not even a lie. “I’m so happy I don’t know what to do with it.”
Her eyes well up. “Oh, damn. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry until the ceremony.”
“It’s fine. Cry now. Get it out of your system.”
“I don’t think I have enough tears for everything I’m feeling.” She pulls me into a hug, tight and fierce. “You deserve this, Ursula. After everything. You deserve to be happy.”
“I know.” I hug her back. “I finally know.”
***
The ceremony starts at sunset.
I stand in the lighthouse bedroom, the room where I left my underwear on his pillow and changed both of our lives. My dress is simple. Ivory silk, flowing and soft, nothing like the beaded monstrosity I wore the first time.
I look like myself.
The five women of the Orchid Society are waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Dayana, Isla, Lucia, Odette, Catarina. All of them in sage green, all of them crying already, all of them the family I chose when the marriage I trusted with everything failed me.
“Ready?” Dayana asks.
“Ready.”
There’s no one to walk me down the aisle. My father died when I was twelve. My mother when I was twenty-two. Bennett was supposed to be my family, and we know how that turned out.
But I don’t need anyone to give me away.
I give myself.
I walk through the assembled guests alone, my mother’s signet ring on my hand, my mother’s diary safe in my bag, her memory wrapped around me like a shawl.
The sea crashes against the rocks. The wind carries the scent of salt and orchids.
And at the end of the aisle, standing on the gallery deck with the sun setting behind him, Matteo waits for me with tears already streaming down his face.
“Hi,” he says when I reach him.
“Hi.”
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re crying.”
“I don’t care.”
I laugh. Take his hands. Feel his fingers interlace with mine.
“We are gathered here,” the officiant begins, but I barely hear him. All I can see is Matteo. All I can feel is the life growing inside me. All I can think about is how far we’ve come from enemies at a dinner table, trading insults because it was the only way we knew how to talk.
Thirteen years of wanting.
One lifetime of having.
“I wrote my own vows,” Matteo says when it’s his turn. “I’ve never been good at this kind of thing, so bear with me.”
He pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. His hands are shaking.
“Ursula. I’ve loved you for thirteen years.
I loved you when I thought I hated you. I loved you when you were someone else’s.
I loved you in every cold look and every sharp word and every dance we never had.
” He looks up from the paper. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for lost time.
I’m going to love you every single day, out loud, where everyone can see.
I’m going to be worthy of you, even though I’m not sure that’s possible.
And I’m going to build a life with you that’s real and lasting, one neither of us has ever had. ”
He puts the paper away.
“You’re my home, Ursula. The lighthouse was just a building until you walked into it. Now it’s where I want to spend the rest of my life. With you. Always with you.”
I’m crying. Everyone’s crying. The officiant is crying, and I don’t even know his name.
“Ursula?” The officiant clears his throat. “Your vows?”
I don’t have a paper. I don’t need one. The words have been living in my chest for months.
“Matteo. I spent thirteen years frozen. All that time pretending not to feel anything, because feeling hurt too much. I built walls so high I forgot there was a world outside them. And then you showed up with your lighthouse and your lanterns and your ridiculous impressions of my ex-husband, and you set me on fire.”
He laughs. The guests laugh. I keep going.
“You saw me when no one else did. You fought for me when I didn’t know how to fight for myself. You showed me that love doesn’t have to be cold, that marriage doesn’t have to be lonely, that I’m allowed to be warm.”
I squeeze his hands.
“For the rest of my life, I’m going to keep learning how to feel again. And I’m going to do it with you. Because you’re not just my home, Matteo. You’re my heart. You’re my fire. You’re everything I didn’t know I was allowed to want.”
The officiant says something. We exchange rings. He pronounces us married.
And Matteo kisses me like we’re the only two people in the world.
The reception is small, intimate, full of laughter and too much champagne. I drink sparkling water and no one notices. I dance with my husband, my husband, and feel the secret of our baby, our baby, flutter through me like the beginning of a song.
Late in the evening, when the guests have drifted down to the rocks to watch the beam turn out over the water, Matteo takes my hand and pulls me into the quiet at the edge of it all. He has the look he gets right before he does something outrageous.
“I have a wedding present for you,” he says. “It’s too big to wrap.”
“Matteo.”
“The first time I ever really saw you, you were standing on a deck in a blue dress, naming a ship after the worst person in your life, because it was the only weapon anyone had ever left you.” He turns my hand over in his.
“I bought the yard your family built. The one Bennett let rot. It’s making ships again.
And the first one coming off the line this autumn doesn’t have a name yet. ”
I know before he says it. I feel it land in my chest like a christening bottle against a hull.
“The Ursula,” he says. “In love, this time. Out loud. In front of everyone, on purpose, so the whole city has to say your name with respect for the next fifty years.”
I can’t speak. For once, neither of us needs me to.