22. Flora
— ? —
Flora
Three weeks later, Aster tells me to keep Saturday night free.
“It’s a charity concert,” he says over breakfast, casual as anything. “For your shelters. All the proceeds go to the rescue network.”
I look up from my coffee. “You planned a charity concert.”
“I’ve been putting it together since we got back from Vermont.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, but I can see the tension in his shoulders. “Your shelters kept you standing while I was busy not being here. Figured I owed them.”
“That’s really sweet.”
“I’m a sweet guy.” He kisses my nose. “Be at the venue by seven.”
“Which venue?”
“You’ll see.”
“I hate that.”
“I know.” He’s already at the door with his jacket half on. “That’s part of it.”
He’s gone before I can push, and I spend the rest of the week trying to work out what he’s up to.
Dylan won’t tell me. My mother, who flew out the week after the party claiming she just wants to make sure things are settled but who I’m fairly sure is here because she enjoys watching Aster try, won’t tell me either.
“He’s your husband,” she says when I corner her in the kitchen. “If he wants to surprise you, let him surprise you.”
“You know something.”
“I know a great many things.” She sips her tea serenely. “Most of them have nothing to do with Saturday.”
“Mom.”
“Flora.” She mirrors my tone exactly. “Trust the process.”
Saturday comes and I stand in front of my closet trying to decide.
My hand goes to the green dress and stops there. That’s the one I put on when I wanted to fade into his shadow, when being looked at directly felt like more than I could hold. I said as much to myself a month ago in a warehouse in the Arts District, and then wore red to a party and started a war.
But green isn’t a costume. It’s my eyes. It’s my mother’s garden in July. It’s the dress he picked, because he said it was the color of my eyes, and my eyes were the thing he couldn’t stop looking at across a diner.
I put on the green dress. Not to disappear in it. To take it back.
The car Dylan sent pulls up to the venue and my jaw comes open.
It’s a stadium. Not a theater, not an arena, a full stadium that holds sixty thousand people, where he played at the absolute height of the tour, a place that sells out in minutes and takes months to organize.
“There must be a mistake,” I tell the driver.
“No mistake, Mrs. Golding.”
The line to get in wraps around the block. I’m walked through a private entrance and past security and through corridors that echo with the noise of a crowd already building.
Dylan meets me at the stage door grinning in a way I’ve never seen on him.
“This way.” He leads me through the backstage maze. “He’s been at this for weeks. Wouldn’t let anybody else handle a single detail.”
“A stadium, Dylan.”
“He booked it, staffed it, and donated every cent he’d have made on it.” Dylan stops at a curtained entrance. “Your husband is not subtle when he’s making a point.”
“What point?”
He just smiles and pulls the curtain aside.
I’m in the wings, hidden from the floor but with a clear view of the whole enormous space. Sixty thousand seats and every one of them full. The energy is a physical thing, a hum coming up through the floor into my chest.
From where I’m standing I can see the front twelve rows.
There’s a woman about my age with a homemade sign.
There’s a man on his own in a tour shirt from six years ago who has clearly been waiting a very long time for something.
There are two teenagers with their arms around each other bouncing on the spot.
Every one of them thinks they’re at a charity show, and so do I.
The lights drop. The crowd roars.
And Aster walks out.
He looks different tonight. Not like the polished performer I’ve watched on screens for four years. He’s in jeans and a plain black t-shirt with his hair unstyled and his feet bare, and he looks like an actual person.
He settles onto a stool at center stage with a guitar in his lap and waits for the screaming to fall off.
“Hey,” he says into the microphone. “Thanks for coming.”
The crowd goes up again. He lets it happen, patient.
“I know you’re here for music,” he says when it’s quiet enough. “And I’ll get to that. But there’s something I need to say first.”
Sixty thousand people go silent.
“Twelve years ago I was a kid with a cheap guitar and no evidence that anything was ever going to happen.” His voice is conversational, like he’s talking to eight people instead of a stadium.
“I spent every night writing songs about a life I didn’t have, singing to an audience that didn’t exist. And somewhere along the line I got everything I asked for.
The stages, the records, all of it.” He strums a chord, soft.
“The problem is I also got something I hadn’t asked for. I got a wife.”
My throat closes.
“She poured me a cup of very bad coffee at two in the morning and changed my entire life. She didn’t care about any of this. She didn’t know who I was, and when she found out she still didn’t care. She just saw a guy in a booth.”
The crowd is completely still.
“And I nearly lost her.” His voice cracks on it.
“I got so caught up chasing the lights that I forgot she was the reason they meant anything. I picked stages over our kitchen table. I picked applause over her laugh. I got it wrong over and over for a year and she’d have been entirely within her rights to go. ”
The tears are coming down my face and I let them.
“She didn’t.” He looks up, and even though I’m in the dark in the wings it feels like he’s looking straight at me. “She gave me another chance I hadn’t earned. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure she never has to wonder whether that was a mistake.”
He takes a breath, and I know what’s coming half a second before he says it, because I have known this man for four years and there is a specific thing he does with his shoulders before he jumps off something.
“This is my last stadium show.”
The crowd detonates. Confusion and protest and a wall of sound that takes a full minute to come down.
“Not my last show,” he says over the top of it.
“I’m not going anywhere. But I’m done with the machine.
Done with year-long tours and press cycles that don’t end.
I’ll write when there’s something to write and play when it feels like playing, and every song I make from here has the same dedication on it. ”
He starts to play.
I know the melody in three notes. It’s the one from the farmers market, the one he played for a stranger’s guitar in a village square where nobody knew his name, except it’s finished now. Fuller. It has an ending.
Sixty thousand phone lights come up in the dark. The song fills every corner of a stadium and I stand in the wings and let it go through me. When he finishes, the noise is deafening and he doesn’t acknowledge any of it.
He stands up.
“Flora?”
I freeze.
“I know you’re back there.” His voice comes through the speakers, gentle and completely certain. “Come here.”
Dylan nudges me forward.
The lights blind me as I step out. The roar of the crowd is a physical pressure against my chest. But all I can see is Aster walking toward me with tears on his face.
He takes my hand and pulls me to the center.
“I never did this properly,” he says, and his voice is raw. “The first time I was so frightened you’d change your mind that I did it in our living room with a ring I bought on the internet and a speech I made up while I was talking.”
“I didn’t mind.”
“I did.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a small box. “You deserved better than that. You have always deserved better than what I was giving you.”
He goes down on one knee.
Sixty thousand people gasp at once.
“Flora Green-Golding.” His hands are shaking as he opens it. There’s a ring inside, not flashy, a plain band with a green stone in it. “Will you marry me again? Your terms, your vows, wherever and however you want it. Just say yes.”
I’m crying too hard to see him properly.
“Yes.” It comes out broken. “Yes, obviously yes, you ridiculous man.”
He slides the ring onto my finger, and of course it fits, and then he’s on his feet pulling me into a kiss while sixty thousand people lose their minds around us.
“I love you,” he says against my mouth.
“I love you too.” I pull back, laughing through it. “Did you have to do that in front of sixty thousand people?”
“You said you were done being invisible.” His grin is enormous. “I thought I’d make sure nobody could miss you ever again.”
Backstage afterward, Dylan is standing at the edge of the wings with his arms folded, and when I look at him he shrugs.
“He told me the morning after I finally asked,” he says. “Somebody canceled this place the week we got back and he had me hold the date before he’d told me what for. I’ve had a month to talk him out of it.”
“Did you try?”
“For about an hour.” Dylan watches the stage. “Then I asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted to be at home on a Tuesday. I’ve worked with him since before anybody knew his name and I have never once heard him want a Tuesday.”
The rest of the concert goes past in a blur. He plays hits and he plays deep cuts and he plays three new songs that put me back in pieces. I watch from a chair somebody brings to the side of the stage, close enough to touch him, refusing to go back into the wings.
When it’s finally over, when the encore is done and the house lights are up and the crowd is filing out, he comes to me sweaty and wrecked and happier than I have ever seen him.
“So,” he says. “How do you feel about Vermont?”
“For the wedding?”
“For the wedding. Your mother’s garden. Small. Only the people who actually matter.” He takes my hand. “There’s no rush on it. Whenever you want.”
“Six weeks,” I say, and I surprise myself with how fast it comes out. “Long enough to get everybody there. Not long enough for either of us to overthink it.”
“Six weeks.” He’s grinning. “She’ll insist on officiating.”
“She’ll do it whether we ask her or not.”
“I’m counting on it.”
I look at the ring on my finger. At my husband, sweat still in his hair, sixty thousand people filing out behind him talking about what they just watched. At a man who stood in front of all of them and gave the machine away without asking anybody’s permission first.
“Can I ask you something,” I say.
“Anything.”
“Do you regret it? Any part of it? Because if you wake up in five years in a garden in Vermont and you miss this, I need to know that’s a thing that could happen. I’d rather know now.”
He thinks about it properly, which is what I wanted. He doesn’t rush to reassure me, and that’s how I know the answer’s real when it comes.
“I’ll miss it sometimes,” he says. “I’d be lying if I said otherwise, and I’ve done enough of that.
There’ll be a night in about two years where I hear something on a radio and want it back for a couple of hours.
” He takes my other hand so he’s holding both.
“And then I’ll come in from the garden and you’ll be there, and it’ll pass.
That’s the deal I’m making. Not that I’ll never want it.
That I’ll never choose it over you again. ”
That’s a better answer than the one I was hoping for.
“Vermont sounds perfect,” I say.