Chapter 33
JESS
The reception was up on the top floor of the Chase Park Plaza, a grand old ballroom with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Forest Park — the whole green sprawl of it going violet in the last of the June light, the Jewel Box somewhere down there in the trees where we’d stood an hour ago — and a hundred strings of warm lights and a dance floor that Anne had negotiated for like she was brokering a hostage release, and by nine o’clock it had achieved the specific golden chaos of a wedding where everybody actually likes each other.
I had done my maid-of-honor duties. I’d given the toast — kept it together through most of it, lost it at the end, the way you’re supposed to.
I’d held Anne’s bouquet and fixed Anne’s lipstick and told Anne six times that yes, she looked perfect, and no, the caterer situation was handled, and yes, she could stop being a project manager for one single evening and simply be a bride.
I’d watched my best friend of six years — the woman I’d met back when we were both single moms just trying to get two toddlers through the day — dance her first dance with a man who looked at her like she’d invented weather.
And now I was standing at the edge of the dance floor with a glass of champagne, watching my son.
Justin was dancing. If you could call it that. He and Finn had discovered that the dance floor was, functionally, a large open space with no furniture in it, and had drawn the only reasonable conclusion, which was that it existed for running.
They were doing a kind of full-contact interpretive sprint in their little suits, ties long since abandoned, shirts untucked, absolutely feral with cake and freedom and the late hour, and every few minutes one of them would crash into an adult’s legs and be redirected without either party breaking stride.
Justin’s hair was stuck to his forehead.
He was having, visibly, the best night of his entire life.
I could remember — with a clarity that stopped my breath a little — a different night a lifetime ago, on the Chicago lakefront on the Fourth of July, watching this same boy inhale a whole tub of popcorn a hockey player had bought him, fireworks going up over the water.
I’d been so careful that night. Keeping one eye on Carter across the blanket, telling myself I had it handled, so sure I knew the exact size and shape of my life.
I have a very settled stance on men. It’s settled.
God, I’d been so sure.
“He’s going to sleep for eleven hours,” Carter said, appearing beside me with two fresh glasses and following my gaze to the small suited tornado on the dance floor. “Minimum. He’s burning a week of energy in one night.”
“He’s going to crash so hard. It’s going to be beautiful.” I took the glass. “Thank you.”
Carter had lost the suit jacket somewhere and rolled his sleeves, and the sight of him like that — forearms, loosened collar, the wedding-warm flush on him — did the thing it always did, the thing I’d apparently never stop being slightly undone by no matter how long I got to keep him. He caught me looking.
He always caught me looking. He raised an eyebrow, and I raised mine right back, unbothered, because no matter what my age, I had earned the right to look at whomever I wanted.
“You gave a good toast,” he said.
“I cried.”
“That’s what makes it good.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Everybody cried. Carol cried through the whole ceremony — cried at the rehearsal, for that matter. It’s her only daughter. She’s been a puddle for two days.”
We stood there for a while, shoulder to shoulder, watching the party. Anne and Liam were doing the rounds, hand in hand, Anne’s veil long gone, both of them lit up from the inside. Barbara Ewing was teaching some of the younger players’ wives a dance step from approximately 1978.
Cole Hartley stood a little apart near the bar, smiling at the room, and I knew tonight couldn’t be an easy one for him.
He’d buried his wife, Claire, a couple of years back — the love of his life, gone to cancer far too young — and he was raising their two kids without her now, with his mother-in-law’s help.
She had the little ones tonight so he could come.
And he had come, and he was genuinely happy for Liam, glass in hand, clapping the loudest at the toasts.
Still. A wedding is a hard place to stand when you know exactly what’s inside the thing everybody’s celebrating, and exactly what it costs to lose it.
I watched him a moment and thought there had to be some wonderful woman out there I could introduce him to. I’d asked Carter once whether anyone had ever tried, and he’d told me it was too early — that Cole wasn’t anywhere near ready.
But watching him now, laughing at something one of the guys said, I wondered if that was still true. Maybe he was ready to meet someone soon.
I’d have to keep an eye on this one.
But that was a worry, or a hope, for another day. Tonight was for the light.
The band shifted into something slow.
“Dance with me,” Carter said.
“I’m holding champagne.”
“Put it down.” He took the glass out of my hand and set it on a passing tray with the smoothness of a man who had decided something. “Ms. Calloway. Dance with me.”
He pulled me out onto the floor and into him, one hand at the small of my back and the other folded around mine against his chest, and we moved slow in the warm light while a hundred strands of bulbs turned everything gold, and I put my head against his chest and felt his heart going steady under my ear and let myself, for once, think about nothing at all.
This was the part I’d stopped believing was meant for me.
The fairy-tale part. Not the big cinematic version — the quiet one. This. The ordinary golden middle of a good night. A slow song. A man’s heartbeat under my ear.
My son asleep-adjacent on a pile of coats somewhere, having run himself to empty. My best friend married. The simple, enormous, unremarkable experience of being exactly where I wanted to be, with exactly who I wanted to be with, and not bracing for any of it to be taken away.
That was the thing I’d never known to want. It wasn’t passion — I’d had passion. It wasn’t even love, exactly — I’d loved Justin with everything I had for six years. And it wasn’t that I’d been unhappy before Carter. I hadn’t. My life had been full and good and entirely my own.
He just made it more. That was the part I hadn’t seen coming — that you could have a whole, happy life and still be handed something extra, something that made an already-good thing even sweeter.
I’d made the life. He was the whipped cream on top — the part you don’t strictly need and would never again want to go without.
“What are you thinking about?” Carter murmured into my hair.
“How lucky I am,” I said. “That I get to stand here with someone this handsome, this good, and call him mine. I keep having to remind myself he’s real.”
I felt him smile against my hair.
“And,” I added, “I’m thinking that for years, I never thought I needed a man in my life. That’s the part that gets me.”
He went still for half a second, then relaxed, because he knew me now, he knew where the sentence was going.
“I know I say a version of this all the time,” I said, into his chest, “and I’m going to say it again anyway, because it’s the truth and I still can’t believe it. You didn’t rescue me. I wasn’t drowning when you found me.”
“I know,” he said. “You never were. And I love that you keep telling me.”
I tipped my head back to look up at him. “You just — added a whole floor to a house I already loved. You showed me my life could be bigger than the biggest I’d ever let myself imagine.
And now I’ve got it, and I can’t imagine the smaller version anymore, and I’m not scared of that. That’s the thing, Carter. Six months ago that would have terrified me — needing the bigger version. And I stood here just now and realized I’m not scared of it at all.”
His arms tightened around me.
“I didn’t need you,” I said. “I want you. Every single day, on purpose, with my whole weight. That’s so much better than needing. Needing is a hole. Wanting is a choice. And I choose it. I choose you. Every day.”
Carter didn’t say anything for a moment. When I looked up, his eyes were wet, and he was looking at me the way he’d looked at me across all that glass and greenery that evening — soft and certain and standing at the edge of some high board, deciding.
“Jess,” he said, and his voice was strange, and for one suspended second the whole room seemed to tilt toward us —
And then Justin hit us at knee level like a small suited missile, having located the two people he loved most in the world and decided they needed to be interrupted immediately, and the moment broke into laughter, and Carter scooped him up against his side without letting go of me, and the three of us swayed there together in the gold light, a small ridiculous huddle in the middle of the dance floor.
“I ran SO FAST,” Justin informed us, breathless, sweaty, radiant.
“We saw,” I said. “You were incredible.”
“Can I have more cake.”
“No.”
“Can I have more cake,” Justin said to Carter, testing the newly available second parent, and Carter said “absolutely not, buddy, your mom’s the boss,” and Justin took this defeat with the philosophical grace of a boy who’d expected it and tried anyway, and put his head down on Carter’s shoulder, spent at last.
And I stood there on a wedding dance floor in June, with a man’s arm around me and my exhausted son slumped against his shoulder and a hundred lights turning everything to gold, and a thought arrived that I’d have laughed at a year ago.
I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, I told myself. But if Carter got down on one knee right here, right now, in the middle of Anne’s wedding — I’d say yes. I wouldn’t even have to think about it.
That’s what a best friend’s wedding does to you, I decided. Makes you sentimental. Makes you dangerous.
But I knew, standing there, that it wasn’t only the wedding. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t bracing for the thing I loved to leave. I was just holding it, with both hands and my whole weight, and letting myself want more of it.