Epilogue
NOELLE
One Year Later
This time, the wedding dress was hers.
She'd found it at a shop on Division she'd been walking past for months — a narrow storefront between the florist and the place that sold handmade soap, with a single dress in the window on a wooden hanger.
The dress was cream. She'd done white, and white belonged to a woman standing at the end of an aisle in a room her father had chosen because it read as restraint. This was cream.
She'd bought it without trying it on. She'd carried it home in a paper bag and hung it in the closet and looked at it for a week before telling Elias she'd found something to wear.
The rooftop was his idea.
They'd sold the penthouse in the spring, quietly, through a broker who hadn't asked why, and the selling had been the first joint decision they'd made since the divorce.
The penthouse had been his rooms. The Mathieus' apartment had been hers.
They'd found, after weeks of looking, an apartment on a tree-lined street in Lincoln Park — walking distance from the bookshop, close enough to the lake that the light in the mornings was the light she'd come to associate with the beginning of things.
The apartment had a rooftop garden. The garden had been neglected by the previous owners: a collection of dead containers, rotting trellises and one stubborn rosemary bush that had survived the winter without anyone asking it to.
She'd rebuilt the garden the way she'd built the bookshop: on her knees, with her hands in the dirt, choosing what to plant without consulting anyone.
Elias had carried the bags of soil up four flights of stairs because the building didn't have a freight elevator.
He'd done it without commenting on the number of bags or the weight of them, and at the end of the afternoon he'd stood at the edge of the rooftop with soil on his shirt and said tell me what goes where and she'd told him and he'd planted where she pointed.
The garden was in full bloom now. The containers were heavy with lavender, rosemary and the trailing nasturtiums she'd started from seed in the kitchen window.
The rooftop was where they were getting married.
The ceremony was at seven, with the long golden light low over the buildings to the west and the lake visible between the rooftops to the east. This one was intimate, fifty people.
Their parents. Friends from the bookshop, from Clark Street, from the neighborhood they'd chosen together.
Enough people to fill the rooftop without crowding it. Enough to make the evening feel held.
The containers of lavender were giving off the warm herbal scent they gave off in the evenings when the day's heat was leaving the soil, and the nasturtiums were trailing over the edges of their pots in long orange and yellow ribbons.
The rooftop looked, she thought standing in the doorway with her mother beside her, like a room someone had built on purpose.
She'd built it on purpose.
Her mother squeezed her arm. "You look — " her mother began.
"Don't say lovely."
"I was going to say like yourself."
Their eyes met, and neither of them said anything else, because the thing that needed saying had been said in a kitchen months ago.
"Ready?" her mother said.
"Yes."
The officiant kept the preamble brief. They said yes at the same time. He kissed her, and she melted into him.
Her mother cried without hiding it. Her father crossed the rooftop with the slow uncertain steps of a man who'd spent years not crossing rooms toward his daughter.
He stopped in front of her and took her hand.
She looked at his face and saw the regret of a man who'd sold his daughter's life and was watching her buy it back.
“I’m sorry, Noelle,” he said. “I’m glad you found your way back to each other. You deserve happiness.”
Noelle’s eyes filled, and for the first time in her life, she embraced him. He returned it.
Later, after the champagne and the dinner at the long table near the nasturtiums, after the guests had gone and the rooftop had emptied, Noelle and Elias stood at the railing and looked out at the city.
They would leave for their honeymoon the next day, two weeks in the south of France that Elias had surprised her with.
But for now, they stood in companionable.
The lake was dark. The grid was lit. The cars moved along the drive in their long white ribbons, the way they'd moved the night she'd stood at the glass wall of the penthouse and watched them for the first time as a woman who was about to marry Elias Strathmore.
Now, Elias's arm was around her waist. She leaned into him. The lavender moved in the breeze.
"Elias."
"Yes."
"We should go to bed. Early flight.”
"We should."
Neither of them moved.
They stood at the railing for a while longer, because there was no hurry. There had been, in every room of their first marriage, a hurry — a hurry to leave, a hurry to close, a hurry to name and assess and manage and produce the next correct sentence.
There was no hurry now. There was only the rooftop. the lavender, the dark lake and the man beside her whose heart she could hear, if she leaned close enough, beating at the pace a heart beat when the man it belonged to was, at last, not afraid.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you, Noelle Strathmore. And now, I need to officially carry you over the threshold.”
Noelle let out a yelp of delight as he swung her up into his arms and carried her off of the rooftop, toward their shared apartment, and the life ahead that awaited them. Together.