27. Jules
— ? —
Jules
The morning of my second wedding starts with my sister spilling coffee on my robe.
“Oh my god.” She’s dabbing at the stain with a napkin, which is only making it worse. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. The cup was right there and I turned around and…”
“It’s fine.” I catch her hands before she can do more damage. “It’s a robe. I’m not getting married in a robe.”
“But it’s silk!”
“It’s also replaceable, unlike you.” I pull her into a hug. “Stop panicking. You’re making me nervous.”
“You’re not nervous?”
“I’m terrified.”
She pulls back, frowning. “Why? You already married him once.”
“And look how that turned out.”
My mother appears in the doorway of the small room Hazel set aside for me to get ready in. “Girls. There are children trying to peek through the window.”
I turn. Sure enough, three small faces are pressed against the glass with their eyes wide. When they see me looking, they scatter with shrieks of laughter.
“They’ve been doing that all morning,” my mother says. “Hazel tried to stop them, but apparently the bride is very interesting.”
“The bride is a mess.”
“The bride is beautiful.” She crosses the room and takes my hands. “And the bride is making the right choice.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.” She squeezes my fingers. “I wasn’t sure at first. When you called from the hospital and told us what happened, I wanted to fly out there and drag you home. I wanted to tell you to leave him and never look back.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you didn’t ask me to.” She smiles. “You’ve always known your own mind, Jules, even when you were little. Even when everyone else was telling you what to do, you made your own choices. And when you told me you were staying, I trusted that you knew what you were doing.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I was angry and hurt and confused.”
“And now?”
I think about the last few months, the slow rebuild and the ordinary days, and the moment at the picnic when Harry stood up for me without being asked, and I finally understood what he’d been trying to show me all along.
“Now I know,” I say.
***
An hour before the ceremony, a bouquet arrives with no card.
My stomach drops when I see it.
They’re white roses, elegant and expensive, with no note and no indication of who sent them.
For one awful second I’m back in that hospital room with Avery’s lilies on the bedside table, and back in every moment when I braced for the next bad thing and it always came.
I’ve hidden things like this from him before. I stopped the morning I held my phone out to him in the guest room, and I’m not going back.
I walk straight to Harry.
He’s in one of the back rooms, adjusting his tie. He turns when I come in, and his expression goes from calm to alert immediately.
“What’s wrong?”
I hold out the bouquet. “This arrived. No card.”
He takes it from me and studies it. He doesn’t dismiss my concern or tell me I’m overreacting. He just pulls out his phone and makes a call.
Two minutes later, he hangs up.
“Your sister,” he says. “She wanted to send flowers before the ceremony. She was in a rush this morning and forgot to sign the card.”
The relief that floods through me is almost painful.
“She spilled coffee on my robe,” I say. “And forgot to sign the card. She’s having a day.”
“Sounds like her.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“Don’t apologize.” He cups my face in his hands. “You did the right thing, coming to me and telling me instead of hiding it.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“But you did.”
I lean into his touch and let myself breathe.
The old Jules would have swallowed it and smiled through the ceremony while the doubt ate her alive. This Jules went to her husband and watched him take her seriously.
I’m back in my own room, with my mother pinning the last of my hair, when there’s a knock at the door and Hazel pokes her head in.
“It’s time,” she says, and her smile is soft and warm. “He’s waiting for you.”
***
The garden at the children’s home is strung with white lights.
It’s not a big wedding. We did big the first time, with hundreds of guests and an elaborate reception, a spectacle designed to impress people we barely knew. This time we wanted it small and real.
My parents are here, and my sister, who is still apologizing about the coffee. Hazel is here with a handful of the staff who have known Harry since he was a boy with holes in his shoes, and a few close friends who stuck around through everything.
There are a couple of dozen people, maybe, standing in a garden as the sun sets, waiting to watch us promise each other forever for the second time.
Hazel officiates.
She married us the first time, in a ceremony so elaborate that I barely remember any of it. This time I’m aware of every word.
Harry’s vows aren’t poetry. They’re promises.
“I promise to listen when you tell me there’s a problem,” he says. His hands are wrapped around mine, warm and steady, and his eyes haven’t left my face. “Even when I don’t want to hear it. Especially when I don’t want to hear it.”
The garden is quiet. Even the children have stopped fidgeting.
“I promise to put you first,” he continues. “Every time, and every day. Not because I’m scared of losing you, but because you deserve to be first. You always deserved that, and I failed you.”
My throat is tight.
“I promise to keep the locks off the doors. I promise to show up at three a.m. when you need me. I promise to make your coffee every morning, and never assume I know what you’re thinking without asking.”
I’m crying now, and I don’t care.
“I promise to be your partner,” he says. “Not your protector, and not your rescuer, and not a man who thinks he knows better than you what you need. Your partner, for as long as you’ll have me.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the rings.
They’re not in the plastic bag anymore. He had them repaired and polished, and I can’t see where the paramedic’s cutter went through the gold. But they’re the same rings he gave me the first time, the same ones that were cut off my finger in the back of an ambulance while I was unconscious.
He slides them onto my finger, for the first time since that day, on the same hand as the gold bracelet that says Forever on the inside of the clasp. I never took that off, not even in the weeks I wanted a divorce.
They feel different now, heavier and more real.
My vows are shorter, because I’ve already said most of what I had to say to his face.
“I promise to trust you,” I say. “I promise to give you the chance to prove you mean it, even when I’m scared. I promise to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop and start believing you when you say you’re here to stay.”
He’s holding my hands so tight it almost hurts.
“I promise to fight for us,” I continue. “Not against you. With you, side by side. And I promise to forgive you, not just once but over and over, every time we mess up, because we will, both of us. And I’d rather mess up with you than be perfect with anyone else.”
Hazel pronounces us husband and wife for the second time, and she says it with a perfectly straight face.
Harry kisses me, and the children cheer, and behind me my mother is sobbing and my sister is whistling and my father is pretending he’s not wiping his eyes.
***
The party afterward is chaos.
There’s no formal reception, no seating chart and no carefully planned schedule of events. There’s just food and music and dancing in the garden while the sun goes down and the lights come on.
Harry dances with the children, or tries to. A group of six year olds has surrounded him, and they’re trying to teach him a dance that involves a lot of spinning and arm waving. He’s failing spectacularly, and they’re loving it.
My father finds me near the dessert table.
“He’s good with them,” he says, nodding toward Harry.
“He is.”
“He wasn’t always this relaxed. When you first brought him home, I thought he was going to have an aneurysm every time someone touched his stuff.”
“He was nervous.”
“He was terrified. I’ve never seen a man so afraid of making a bad impression.” My father pauses. “I’ve also never seen a man look at my daughter the way he looks at you.”
I watch Harry across the garden. One of the children has climbed onto his shoulders, and he’s spinning in circles while she shrieks with laughter.
“I almost left him,” I say. “After the fire. I was ready to walk away.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad I didn’t.”
“I know that too.” He puts his arm around my shoulders. “Your mother and I had our rough patches, you know, early on. She threw a plate at my head once.”
“She did not.”
“She did. I ducked, the plate hit the wall, and we didn’t speak for three days.” He shrugs. “Marriage is hard. Staying married is harder. But when you’re with the right person, it’s worth the hard parts.”
Harry catches my eye across the garden and smiles.
I smile back.
Hazel appears at my elbow and tucks her arm through mine.
“Took him long enough,” she says, and that’s all she says.
***
That night, we go home, to our home and our bedroom and our bed.
The door stays open when we walk in. Harry doesn’t close it. He hasn’t closed a door on me since the fire, and he isn’t going to start now.
“Wife,” he says, turning to face me.
“Husband.”
He grins, that stupid, boyish grin I fell in love with. “Say it again.”
“Husband.”
“Again.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You married me. Twice.”
“Temporarily insane. Both times.”
He laughs and crosses the room to kiss me, softly at first, and then not softly at all.
His hands find the zipper at the back of my dress. He tugs at it.
Nothing happens.
He tugs again, and still nothing happens.
“What the…” He pulls back, frowning at my dress. “Is this thing welded shut?”
“There are buttons.”
“Where?”
“At the top. Tiny ones.”
He spins me around, and I hear him make a sound of pure frustration. “These aren’t buttons. These are torture devices. Who designs a dress with thirty buttons the size of rice grains?”
“It’s fashion.”