24. Izzy #2
“Distinguished gray. It adds character.” He turns his head and kisses my fingertip.
“It adds years.” I pull my hand back and poke him in the chest.
“You’re literally roasting me at our wedding right now.” He grabs my poking finger and holds it hostage.
“Vow renewal. And yes. Get used to it.” I try to tug my finger free and he won’t let go.
The officiant clears her throat gently, smiling. “Should I give you two a moment, or…?”
“No, no, we’re good.” I turn us to face her. “Please continue. Before he starts crying and never stops.”
“I’m not going to cry,” Wilson says, already crying.
“You’re literally crying right now.”
“These are preemptive tears. They don’t count.”
The ceremony is short, exactly the way we wanted it. No readings from poetry books neither of us has actually read, no unity candles to light, no sand-pouring rituals we’d have to explain to confused relatives who wouldn’t understand the symbolism anyway.
Just us, and our vows, and the people who stuck around through everything while we figured out how to be married to each other again.
Wilson goes first.
“Eight years ago, I stood on this roof at our reception and made you promises in front of eleven friends, a folding table, and champagne we couldn’t afford.” His voice shakes badly, but his eyes stay locked on mine. “You know what I said. Everybody on this roof knows what I said. It’s on a DVD.”
He stops, and the breath he pulls in rattles audibly.
“I forgot those promises, Izzy.” Tears are threatening to spill over. “I broke them. Over and over again.”
He swallows and tries again.
“I told myself I was building us a future. I convinced myself that the missed dinners and the missed appointments and the missed years were just temporary. That there would always be more time to make it up to you.”
“Wilson, you don’t have to…” I start to reach for him.
“Let me finish. Please.” He grips my hands hard enough that my rings bite into my fingers. “I broke my promises and I broke us. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life keeping them instead. Every day. Every choice.”
He looks at me.
“Every time the phone rings with some emergency that needs me on a plane, I’m going to remember that the only real emergency is losing you again. That’s it. You’re it for me, Izzy. You always were.”
The tears are running freely down my face now, definitely ruining the makeup Sarah spent an hour on this morning.
“Your turn,” the officiant says gently.
I breathe in until my ribs ache.
“Eight years ago, I married a man with nothing but a dream and a ring he saved four months for.” A watery laugh escapes me. “That ring turned my finger green for a solid month.”
Wilson smiles through his tears, his hands tightening around mine.
“I married you because you made me laugh in a coffee shop when I was ugly crying over a failed art history exam. You just handed me your napkin without saying anything. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.”
I squeeze his hands back.
“I married you because you looked at me like you couldn’t believe you got to keep me. Because I believed every word you said about the future we were going to build. Because I was young and hopeful and so in love that nothing else mattered.”
“Izzy, God…” He can’t finish.
“Our relationship went through tests I never could have imagined when I married you eight years ago.” My voice wavers but I keep going. “Things I thought would break us forever. Things that almost did.”
He nods, jaw tight.
“But I’m thankful it happened.” I reach up and wipe a tear from his face with my thumb. “Not just because it made us stronger, but because now, more than ever, I am completely sure that you are the man I want to grow old with. The one I want beside me through all of it.”
“Izzy, please…” He can barely get my name out.
“I will choose to fight for us, every day, until my last one.” I hold his gaze and let him see everything. “Whatever comes next, we face it together. No more running. No more hiding. Just us.”
“I can’t imagine my life without you, Wilson.” I bring his hands to my lips and kiss his knuckles. “You are my forever.”
He laughs, broken and wet. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Probably not.” I grin through my own tears. “But you’re stuck with me anyway.”
“Then kiss me and make it official already. I’m tired of crying.”
“You look beautiful when you cry.”
“I look like a raccoon when I cry and you know it.”
“A beautiful raccoon.”
“Wilson, just kiss me.”
He pulls me into his arms and kisses me, and somewhere in the folding chairs someone lets out a wolf whistle.
James yells “Get a room already!” at the top of his lungs and the officiant pronounces us renewed and recommitted while we’re still laughing into each other’s mouths, missing most of what she actually says.
***
The reception fills the rooftop with music, laughter, and the constant clink of plastic flutes, everyone drinking the same cheap champagne we served eight years ago.
“Why this specific brand?” Dana asks, examining her glass with a skeptical expression. “You could definitely afford better at this point.”
“That’s exactly why we picked it.” I clink my glass against hers. “We wanted this. The exact same taste. We chose it on purpose this time instead of because we were broke.”
“That’s either really romantic or really weird.”
“Why not both?”
“Fair point.” Dana takes a sip. “It’s actually not bad for cheap champagne.”
“It’s terrible. That’s the whole point.”
Caroline takes the microphone for the toast, cheeks flushed from crying and drinking in roughly equal measure, and the crowd settles down to listen.
“I’m Wilson’s mother. I wasn’t on this roof the first time.” She pauses, her jaw tightening. “Edward made sure of that. But I’m here now, and that’s what matters.”
She dabs under her eyes with one knuckle, smearing her mascara further.
“I watched it fall apart. I had this girl to tea and told her, straight to her face, that I wasn’t going to ask her to forgive my son.”
The crowd shifts nervously. My mother squeezes Caroline’s hand.
“I told her he’d forgotten how to choose her. That I wasn’t even sure he remembered how anymore.” Her voice wavers. “That he’d become his father in all the worst ways.”
She takes a breath and looks at Wilson.
“I was wrong. I watched my son become his father, and then I watched him refuse to stay that way. He clawed his way back to being someone I could be proud of.” She smiles, tears spilling over. “He proved me wrong, and I have never in my entire life been happier to lose an argument.”
Wilson raises his glass to concede the point.
“To second chances,” Caroline says, lifting her flute toward where we stand wrapped around each other. “And to the people brave enough to actually take them.”
“To second chances,” the rooftop echoes, and we all drink together.
Helena cries so hard through the toast she has to excuse herself to the bathroom to recover. James’s wife Sarah catches my hand as I pass and tells me the ceremony was beautiful.
“Thank you for being here, Sarah. Both of you.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” She glances at James wrestling their youngest, who’s finally awake and demanding attention at maximum volume. “Even if we had to bring the whole circus.”
“The circus adds atmosphere.”
“That’s a generous word for it.”
Across the roof, James finds Wilson by the drinks table and stands in front of him with his arms folded for a long second.
Then he unfolds them.
The hug is short and hard and involves a lot of back-slapping, and when James lets go he points a finger at him and says a sentence I can’t hear. Wilson nods. James claps him once more on the shoulder and walks off, and Wilson stands there a moment longer than he needs to.
Linda corners me by the cheese table a few minutes later, voice dropped to classified-information levels.
“So here’s the thing.” She sips her champagne and watches Wilson across the roof, where he’s crouched down talking to James’s son, a conversation involving a lot of hand gestures. “He used to be first in the office and last out. Every day. No exceptions.”
“I remember.”
“Now he leaves at five to get home to you. Five, Izzy. I didn’t even know the man knew what five o’clock looked like.
” She shakes her head. “The board grumbled about it for a month, convinced everything would fall apart without him hovering over every decision. Then they noticed his work actually got better. The office ran just fine without him in every room, maybe even better. Turns out being happy makes him smarter. Who knew?”
“I had a theory about that.”
“So did I.” Linda clinks her glass against mine. “I just didn’t believe it until I saw it happen.”
Later, when the crowd has thinned and the playlist has slowed to slow-dance territory, Wilson finds me at the edge of the roof where I’m looking out at the bridges strung with light.
“Dance with me?” He holds out his hand, palm up.
“There’s barely any music left playing.”
“There’s enough.” He draws me in close when I take his hand. “There’s always enough.”
We sway together, my head on his shoulder, his hand warm at the small of my back where it belongs.
“Any regrets?” I ask the question into the fabric of his collar.
“Only how long it took us to get here.” He presses his lips to my hair. “Only the years I wasted being someone I’m ashamed of now.”
“We have decades to make up for it.”
“Then we should start making them up right now.” He spins me out away from him and reels me back in, and my wine-red dress swirls around my ankles while I laugh, breathless.
We dance until the caterers start folding up the chairs around us, until Caroline and Helena blow exaggerated kisses from the elevator, until James herds his exhausted family toward home with promises to do brunch soon.
The elevator comes back up empty. Then it comes up one more time, and this time it isn’t.