50. Leah
LEAH
The tree looked the same as it always did this time of year, wide and glittering and slightly crooked at the top where a windstorm two winters back had never quite let it recover.
I stood underneath it in a dress I'd designed myself, feeling something in my chest I hadn't expected, no matter how many weddings I'd planned.
I'd planned hundreds of weddings in my life if you counted every festival, every candlelight walk, every reunion dinner I'd built for other people's happiness.
I had never once planned my own until this year, and it turned out the woman who built other people's perfect days down to the last folded napkin had absolutely no intention of handing this one over to anybody else.
Snow hadn't started falling yet. The sky hung low and gray and patient above the square, waiting, the same way the whole town seemed to be waiting, for exactly the right moment.
Folding chairs lined the square in the same neat rows I'd once mapped out on a coffee shop whiteboard for a festival that felt like a hundred years ago now, white ribbon tied to every lamppost, the whole town bundled up in coats and scarves and pretending the cold didn't bother them nearly as much as it clearly did.
Pinewood Perk had shut down for the afternoon, a hand-lettered sign taped to the door that read CLOSED FOR A WEDDING, OBVIOUSLY, in Maddie's handwriting.
Half the department stood near the back in dress uniform, and I caught Tomás wiping his eyes early, well before the ceremony had even started, which set off a ripple of teasing down the whole row that he pretended not to hear.
Doris stood at the makeshift altar we'd built at the base of the tree, reading glasses perched low on her nose, a folder of index cards trembling slightly in the cold.
She'd demanded to officiate the second she heard we were engaged, informing us in the same breath that she'd already gotten herself ordained online and there would be no further discussion on the matter.
"By the power vested in me by absolutely nobody, but which this town has granted me anyway...
" She paused for the laugh, got it, and pressed forward with the specific satisfaction of a woman who'd been rehearsing this line for months.
"I now pronounce you a great deal more trouble together than you ever were apart, which, having watched the two of you this past year, I consider the highest compliment I know how to give. "
Ember walked the ring down the aisle in a tiny black bowtie clipped to his collar, solemn as a funeral director, pausing exactly once to accept a scratch behind the ears from a toddler in the front row before continuing on with his job like nothing at all had happened.
"I spent most of my life bracing for the day I'd lose whatever I loved," Derek said, when it came time for his vows, his voice steady in a way that undid me more than any grand gesture could have.
"You taught me the season I used to dread the most was only ever waiting for somebody to make it worth staying home for.
I'm done bracing. I'm just going to love you, out loud, for as long as you'll let me. "
I got through maybe half of my own vows before my voice gave out entirely, something about a U-Haul and a dented tailgate and a man who'd yelled at me about my bumper and somehow become the only home I'd ever wanted.
Doris had to pause twice to let me finish crying enough to keep talking.
When she finally told Derek he could kiss me, he didn't wait for the sentence to finish.
Sarge stood at the head table with a microphone he clearly didn't need, given how loud his regular voice already carried, and cleared his throat like a man settling in for the long haul.
"I've known this man fifteen years." He nodded toward Derek, who was already bracing in the way of a man who knew exactly what was coming. "He once told me feelings were a liability. Look at him now."
The room laughed, warm and immediate, and Sarge let it settle before he kept going, his voice dropping into something rougher and more careful.
"I watched this man carry more weight than any person should have to carry alone.
I watched him decide, more than once, that the safest thing he could do for the people he loved was disappear a little at a time, so it wouldn't hurt as much when he eventually lost them.
" His voice caught, and the room went quiet in the way it does when everyone recognizes the truth of something before they fully understand what's being said.
"I watched him learn, the hard way, that love isn't a liability.
It's the whole point. Derek, you found somebody who taught you the scary thing and the right thing are usually the exact same thing. Don't you dare let go of her."
He raised his glass, and by the time he sat back down half the room was openly crying, myself very much included, mascara be damned.
Derek stood up right after him, cleared his throat, and said only, "Everything he just said is true, and I hate that he got to say it before I did," which somehow made the crying worse instead of better.
Later, once the toasts finished and the band started up, Derek pulled me onto the makeshift dance floor we'd laid over the frozen grass, one hand sure at my waist, and neither of us said anything for a long moment, just moved slow under string lights he'd hung himself without a single tangle to show for it.
A gift had arrived from Rachel two days before the wedding, no return address needed because I already knew her handwriting by then.
Inside sat a framed photograph of Derek in his rookie years, standing next to a fire engine with a grin so unguarded I almost didn't recognize him, and a card that read simply, "I'm glad he found his way back to that smile.
Congratulations to you both." I'd cried reading it alone in my kitchen, in a way that had nothing to do with sadness at all.
Priya stood at the edge of the ceremony in full dress uniform, an honor guard of exactly one, spine straight enough to make a marine jealous, and I caught her wiping her eyes once during the vows with the back of one white glove before snapping straight back into position like discipline alone could undo it.
Harlan Digby showed up.
We'd invited him mostly as a joke, a line item Derek added specifically to see Sarge's reaction, and none of us had expected the man himself to actually appear in a stiff gray suit, standing awkwardly near the punch bowl like he wasn't entirely sure the invitation had been sincere.
"The department's numbers have never looked better," he told me, apropos of nothing, somewhere between the toasts and the cake. "Response times, call volume, budget efficiency. I thought you should know I've stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one."
"That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Harlan."
"Don't get used to it." He glanced toward the dance floor, where Derek was currently being spun in an enthusiastic and entirely unauthorized circle by Doris, and something almost like a smile crossed his face before he caught himself. "Congratulations, Ms. Bennett. Truly."
He left twenty minutes later without eating any cake. "That is the single most on-brand exit I have ever witnessed," Sarge announced to the whole table, already reaching for a second slice.
Maddie spent most of the reception with her daughter balanced on one hip, chasing down our actual flower girl, Priya's niece, who had apparently decided halfway through the aisle that flower petals were significantly more fun thrown directly at guests' faces than scattered gently at their feet.
Maddie caught her twice, laughing too hard to properly scold her, baby squirming happily against her shoulder the whole time like chaos already ran in the family.
"She takes after you," Maddie told me between rescues, breathless, cheeks flushed from the cold and the running both.
"Somebody with a plan for absolutely everything and zero ability to sit still while it happens. "
"I resent that."
"You'll resent it more once you have one of your own."
Bennett Events and Weddings had a waitlist stretching into next autumn now, longer than I'd ever let myself dream when I first painted that door in Denver with more hope than sense.
I'd hired a second planner in the spring, a sharp, capable woman named Ana who reminded me of who I used to be, minus the U-Haul and the dented tailgate.
Some mornings I caught myself handing off a whole wedding without the old, familiar urge to double check every detail myself.
The department had its second engine, fully funded and permanently secured, parked in a bay that used to sit half empty on a budget that used to keep me up at night worrying for a man I hadn't even started dating yet.
By the time we made it back to the house that evening, boots still full of confetti and rice, the porch sat dark the way it always did until Derek decided to do something about it.
He decided that night with his tie already loosened and his good shoes traded for boots, dragging the same box of string lights out of the garage he'd fought every winter since I'd known him.
"You're doing this tonight? In your wedding clothes?"
"There's no rule against it."
"There's a rule against reasonable behavior, apparently."
He grinned down at me from the ladder, and I directed him from the porch steps the way I'd apparently be directing him for the rest of both our lives, coat traded for his suit jacket, breath fogging in the cold.
Ember supervised from the top step with the same mild, unhelpful interest he brought to every project that didn't involve food, tuxedo bowtie already traded for his regular collar, tail thumping once whenever either of us laughed.
"Left a little." He moved the strand exactly opposite of what I meant. "No. Your left, not mine. We've had this exact fight before."
"We have had this exact fight every single winter since the day you hit my truck."
"I hit your truck once. You've been telling that story wrong for a year now."
"I've been telling it exactly right for a year now."
He laughed, low and easy, and kept working.
I stood there on the steps of the house that was finally, fully ours, watching snow start to fall soft and slow through the porch light he'd just switched on.
It caught gold in his hair the same way it had caught in my headlights the night I first skidded into this town with everything I owned packed into a U-Haul and nothing resembling a plan.
"You know I used to dread this whole season." He said it without looking down from the ladder, easy, like it cost him nothing at all to admit out loud anymore. "Every single year of it, from Thanksgiving straight through to New Year's. I used to count down the days until it was over."
"And now?"
He climbed down off the ladder at last, boots crunching in the thin new snow, and pulled me in against him with the same steadiness I'd felt in his hands on the aisle that afternoon, like holding onto me had never once been hard for him at all.
"Now I can't imagine a single Christmas without you in it."
The snow kept falling, soft and constant, gathering gold under every light he'd finally gotten to hang without a single knot fighting him for it.
I stood there on the porch of our home, watching my husband string lights in his wedding suit, and understood, once and for all, that I'd driven into exactly the right ditch.