Chapter 16 #2
Not in a church, not in a venue, not with an officiant or a photographer or any of the machinery that weddings usually involved.
On the back patio of the Palisades house, with the canyon below and the winter light coming through the trees and Zadie standing in front of them in a sweater and jeans with a piece of paper in her hand that she'd written herself.
"I'm not going to make a speech," Zadie said. "I'm going to say two things and then you're going to say your thing and then we're going to eat."
She looked at Nell. Then at Cassian. Then back at Nell.
"I was wrong about you," she said to Cassian.
"Not about the cheating — you did that and it was what it was.
I was wrong about the rest. I thought you couldn't change.
I thought the charm and the management and the smoothing were all of you, and that everything underneath was the same man wearing a different shirt.
I was wrong. You're different. I don't love you for it, but I respect it, and respect is harder for me, so take the compliment. "
Cassian smiled. Not the old smile — the new one, the smaller one. "Taken."
Zadie looked at Nell. Her eyes were bright.
"And you," Zadie said. "You were right to go back.
I didn't think so. I wanted you back — my Nell, the one I lost to his world — and I thought going back meant losing you again.
But you didn't go back to his world. You brought your world with you.
You came back as a whole person, with the camera and the career and the apartment and the shelf, and you made him make room for all of it.
I have my friend back. Not the old one. A better one. The one who knows what she's worth."
Zadie folded the paper. She stepped back.
Nell looked at Cassian. The winter light caught the silver at his temples. The lines around his eyes. The face of a man who had been stripped to his foundation and had built something new on it, slowly, without grace, one honest sentence at a time.
"I choose you," she said. "Not the man you were.
The man you are. The one who lost the deal and told me about it.
The one who catches himself performing and says it out loud.
The one who let me go because it was the only generous thing he'd ever done.
I choose the man who showed up after I stopped waiting, the one who was terrified and said so.
I choose you with my eyes open and my life intact and my camera by the door.
I'm not giving anything up this time. And I'm not going anywhere. "
He took her hands. His were steady.
"I choose you," he said. "The woman who watched me for six weeks and saw everything and let me fail every test because she needed to know the truth.
The woman who built a life from nothing and proved she didn't need me and chose me anyway.
The woman who made a film I could never have made and who never let me help with it and who didn't let me take credit for it and who is standing here right now being more honest than I've been in my entire life.
" He stopped. His voice was thick. "I promise to tell you the truth.
Every day. The ugly truths, the small truths, the truths that cost me.
I promise to see you — not the view, not the constant, not the place I live.
You. Every day. For as long as you let me. "
Zadie handed them each a glass of wine — the good kind, the kind Cassian used to buy because it impressed people. He'd chosen it this time because Nell liked it.
They drank. They ate. The three of them, on the patio, with the canyon and the winter light and the quiet of a Sunday afternoon.
Zadie told a story about Nell in their twenties — a shoot that went wrong, a camera that fell in a river, the look on Nell's face when she pulled it out and it still worked.
Cassian laughed. Nell laughed. The laughter was easy and real and belonged to all three of them.
After Zadie left, Nell and Cassian stood at the edge of the patio and looked at the canyon. The light was going gold, the way it did in December, the low winter sun casting everything in amber. His arm was around her waist. Her head was on his shoulder.
"I love you," he said.
"I know."
"I'm going to keep saying it."
"I know that too."
She turned to look at him. Forty-three now — his birthday had passed in September, and she'd made him dinner and he'd told her about a meeting that went wrong and she'd told him about a shot she'd captured that didn't work and they'd sat at the kitchen table and been honest about the small failures of their days and it had been the best birthday he'd ever had. He'd told her so. She'd believed him.
"Come inside," she said.
They went inside. The house was warm. The glass bowl from the Brooklyn flea market was on the counter where it had always been, and it held oranges now — she'd put them there that morning, five navel oranges from the farmers market, the color of them bright against the glass.
Twenty years and three thousand miles from the flea market where they'd found it, the bowl was still doing what bowls did: holding the things you put in them, catching the light, being present.
She picked up an orange and peeled it and handed half to Cassian and they stood in the kitchen and ate it, the juice on their fingers, the citrus smell filling the room, and the house was quiet and the canyon was dark outside and the marriage was new and the marriage was theirs.
This was the life. Not the life she'd planned or the life she'd been given or the life she'd built alone in Silver Lake. The life she'd chosen. All of it — the camera and the film and the career and the man and the house and the bowl and the oranges and the truth.
All of it was hers.