Chapter 5
Aurora Akande got married to Halston Iverson on a Friday afternoon in late August. The ceremony was in a small wood-paneled courtroom on the seventh floor of the Harris County Courthouse.
She would remember, for the rest of her life, that she could not stop looking at the band aid on his hand.
It was smaller now than it had been — just a single strip of white surgical tape across the heel of his right palm. Three weeks had passed since Geneva, and he had never let the cut be properly closed. He had told the company doctor to stop fussing over him and let it heal on its own.
Aurora had never asked how he had done it but he had never offered any details.
She was wearing a tea-length dress in heavy cream silk with a square neckline, quarter sleeves, and a slight A-line skirt.
Her hair was out and full around her shoulders, her natural curls washed and softened with the leave-in cream her mother had bought her at the Black-owned salon in the Third Ward, the loose spirals catching the afternoon light through the courtroom window like fresh ribbon.
She had small gold studs in her ears and wore the gold cross her grandmother had left her around her neck. She had let Yvette put a single small white camellia behind her left ear, and the flower smelled faintly of summer and of the south yard of the estate.
She looked, she thought when she had stood in front of her mother's full-length mirror that morning in the Third Ward house, like a woman about to do something she could not undo.
She had not let herself think any further than that.
The witnesses were Errol in his good dark suit, his good white shirt and the cufflinks Ayanna had given him for their twentieth anniversary.
His carpenter's hands folded in front of him in a way Aurora knew meant I am not happy and but I am not going anywhere.
And Ayanna, who stood beside him in a soft lavender dress and a small clutch handbag.
Yvette was on Aurora's side of the room, because Aurora had asked her to be and Halston had not argued. Rhett Talbot, Halston’s COO, his oldest friend stood on Halston's side, the only person there with his hair the color of fire, a man in his mid-thirties as Black as Cyrus had been, sharp gray suit and immaculate beard.
And Imari.
Imari was the ring-bearer. She was wearing a pink dress, because pink was Imari's favorite color, and white tights, and white shoes.
Her hair was in two careful braided buns at the back of her head that Aurora had done with her own hands that morning at the kitchen table in the Third Ward.
Ayanna had stood behind Aurora the entire time, offering nothing but presence.
Imari was holding a small white satin pillow with the rings on it. She was also holding her Squishmallow under her other arm.
She had refused to be separated from Archie the Axolotl. Aurora had not argued.
Beatrix Iverson was not there.
Aurora had not asked and Halston had not offered any information on the subject.
Yvette had told her in passing, while pinning the camellia, that the master's stepmother had sent her regrets from River Oaks.
She is not pleased, chère. She will come around or she will not.
The world will not stop turning either way.
It was, in its own small way, the most relaxing wedding-day fact Aurora had been told.
The judge was a thin woman with iron-gray hair and reading glasses on a chain, a friend of Mason's. She had performed exactly twenty-two of these ceremonies in her career, and she was performing this one without commentary and without unnecessary speech.
She read the civil words then looked at Halston.
“Mr. Iverson. Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love and protect, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?”
Halston looked at Aurora.
He looked at her like she was the answer to a question he had been asking himself in what felt like forever.
“I will,” he said.
Two clear words. No qualification. No legal disclaimer. Aurora's throat closed up.
The judge turned to Aurora.
“Miss Akande. Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love and protect, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?”
Aurora looked at Halston.
She thought, very clearly, about the way his hands had shaken when he tried to hold her face the night before he left for Stanford.
She thought about Imari standing two feet behind her with a satin pillow.
“I will,” she said.
Halston reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
Aurora had expected a platinum band. She had been at the jeweler's in River Oaks with Yvette four days earlier, picking it out. A slim band, brushed finish, nothing ostentatious. He had ordered it. She had watched him put down a credit card for it.
What he drew out of his pocket now was not platinum.
It was a small, worn, soft-gold ring.
Time stopped in the courtroom.
Aurora's whole body went still. Her mouth went dry. Her eyes went up to Halston's and she could not look away. Halston, who had not allowed himself a single uncontrolled second since the will reading, did not look away from her either.
The ring sat in his open palm, the same way it had sat in his palm at the boathouse fifteen years ago. Dull-gold and tiny and the most familiar object on this earth.
His great-grandmother's ring.
The ring she had taken off her thumb and set down on the gravel of the Iverson driveway in her bare feet at eighteen years old.
The ring she had assumed, every day of the last fifteen years, was at the bottom of a Galveston Bay tide somewhere, or melted down in a Houston pawn shop, or sitting in the safe of a Palo Alto fiancée who had never actually existed.
He had it.
He had had it the entire time.
“Halston,” she whispered. His name came out of her mouth without her realizing it.
His mouth twitched, just barely. He did not smile. His eyes had gone soft around the edges. She had not seen that look since she was eighteen.
“I went back,” he said, very quietly. Only she could hear him. “I went back that afternoon. I picked it up out of the gravel. I have had it for fifteen years.”
The room did not exist anymore.
There was no judge. No father or mother. No Imari. No Rhett or Yvette, no certificate on the bench, no flag on the wall. There was only Halston and the small gold ring in his open palm, and the great wide silent fifteen years between them which had just collapsed in on itself like a dying star.
He slid the ring slowly onto her finger.
It fit. He had had it resized at some point, because at eighteen it had been too big for any finger but her thumb, and now it slid onto her ring finger like it had been made for it.
Aurora could not get the next breath in.
“Aurora,” the judge said, very gently. “Your turn, dear.”
Aurora's hands were shaking. She could barely hold the platinum band Imari had passed up to her. She got it onto Halston's finger only because her father had stepped a half-inch closer to her on her left side, and the small warmth of him against her shoulder steadied her hand.
She could not get her vows out. They had agreed on the standard civil ones for the courthouse. She had memorized them but they were nowhere to be found.
“To love,” Halston said softly. The most patient voice she had ever heard out of him. “And to protect.”
“To love,” she managed, “and to protect.”
“In sickness and in health.”
“In sickness and in health.”
“For as long as we both shall live.”
“For as long as we both shall live.”
The judge smiled, finally. “By the power vested in me by the State of Texas, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Mr. Iverson, you may kiss your bride.”
Halston did not move toward Aurora. He turned, instead, very deliberately, to her left. To Errol.
The whole room held its breath.
“Sir,” Halston said, low enough that only Errol heard him. “I know what you think of me. I am not going to ask you to change your mind. I will show you.”
Errol, who had told his wife fifteen years ago he was going to drive up to the Iverson estate and put his fist through Theodore Iverson's face, looked his daughter's husband in the eye for one long quiet moment.
He nodded once.
It was not forgiveness, nowhere near forgiveness. But it was not nothing either.
Then, and only then, Halston turned back to Aurora, set his hands very gently along the line of her face, and kissed her.
It was a short kiss, measured. The kind of kiss a man gave a woman in a courthouse in front of her parents and an eight-year-old. It was nothing like the kiss in the boathouse.
But it was, at the same time, exactly like it.
The shape of his mouth was the same. The cleanness of the cedar smell of him was the same. The way his thumb rested against the corner of her face.
He pulled back but did not let go of her face. His eyes searched hers.
He had not explained the ring, she thought. Not a word — not why he had kept it, not what it was supposed to mean now. He had simply slid it onto her finger and left the question sitting there between them: what do you want to do about it?
She did not have an answer for him yet.
She let him lead her down the aisle anyway.
Imari trotted after them with her Squishmallow clamped under one arm and the satin pillow forgotten on a courtroom bench.
Yvette and Ayanna openly cried into their handkerchiefs.
And Errol, hands still folded, watched his daughter walk out of a courtroom on the arm of the wealthiest man in Pinewood Hollow County.
*****
That evening Yvette had laid the long dining table at the estate for the eight of them and two extra place settings at the foot of the table for Maeve and Cyrus, with a single white hydrangea floating in a low crystal bowl above each empty plate, which Aurora did not see until she had already sat down.
It made her stop halfway into pulling out her own chair.
She did not say anything about it. Neither did Halston. Nor did anyone else.