Chapter 299
Chapter 294: Wedding One, After
DANTE
The reception was loud and long and exactly right.
Claim
My mother had flown in from Spain with my aunt and two cousins, who had never met Sedona before tonight and had, within forty-five minutes, decided they loved her completely. This was not surprising; my mother had a gift for making decisions about people quickly and accurately, and Sedona was, by any reasonable measure, easy to love once you’d spent enough time in the same room as her.
Jennifer and my mother found each other by the food table within the first hour. I watched this happen from across the garden, two women who had raised children they were enormously proud of, discovering that they had approximately the same opinions about feeding people and approximately the same conviction that every guest needed more on their plate than they currently had. By the end of the evening, they were exchanging recipes with the intensity of people conducting important research.
Nick and Drew lasted until ten-thirty.
They’d been running on pure celebration energy for hours, the ceremony, the food, the dancing that Lake had organized with slightly too much authority, the long golden stretch of an October evening that had refused to get dark at any reasonable hour. By ten, they were sitting together on a wooden bench near the edge of the garden, leaning into each other, both trying very hard to stay awake through the sheer force of not wanting the day to end.
By ten-thirty, they’d stopped trying.
Drew went first, his head dropping onto Nick’s shoulder. The bird notebook he’d been carrying all day was sliding gently off his lap. Nick lasted another few minutes, fighting it with his eyes, before he simply gave up and let his own head rest against Drew’s, both of them asleep in the specific boneless way of children who have been completely, thoroughly happy for a very long time and have finally run out of fuel.
I stood nearby and watched them for a moment, not wanting to move them yet, not wanting to end the specific picture of it, two boys who had found their way to each other through all the complicated, hard-won history of these past two years, now simply asleep on a bench together like it had always been this easy.
Parker appeared beside me. I hadn’t heard him coming, which was characteristic; he had a way of arriving in a space without announcing himself, as if he’d simply been there slightly longer than you’d noticed.
We stood together looking at the boys for a moment, the party carrying on warmly behind us, neither of us feeling any particular need to fill the quiet.
“I want to tell you something directly,” Parker said.
“Okay,” I retorted.
“I wasn’t certain about you, in the beginning. I want to be honest about that. Not against you, I simply didn’t know you yet, and I’m not in the habit of forming opinions before I have enough information. But I watched carefully, over the past two years, the way you handle things. How are you with Nick? How were you with
1.3
Wedding Qpeter Party
Sedona when everything was hardest?
Claim
“How you handled what happened to you in the parking lot. And came back from it with head still high p>
He paused. He slightly shook his head. And he turned and looked at his sleeping grandsons.
“I’m glad it was you. No decoration on it.
I didn’t have many words for that moment. want to be honest about that. I stood there beside Parker Preston, the most measured man I’d ever met. And felt something move through me that I wouldn’t have been able to name, even if I’d had the vocabulary ready.
It wasn’t just the words themselves, though the words were everything they needed to be.
“Thank you. It wasn’t enough, and it was exactly right, and I think he understood both things.
r
He nodded once. The way he nodded when something had been said properly and didn’t need adding to. Then he turned back toward the party.
Then he stopped, briefly, and said over his shoulder: “Those two are going to be something, you know. The boys. Between Nick’s instincts and Drew’s thoroughness, I think they’ll be formidable p>
“I think so too,” I said.
He walked back toward the lights and the music and Jennifer, who had apparently been waiting for him to return before she would allow anyone else to cut the cake.
I looked at Nick and Drew on the bench for another minute.
Nick had shifted in his sleep, pulling his jacket around himself without waking, the way kids did when they were cold but not cold enough to actually get up and do anything about it. Drew had his notebook tucked against his chest now, still held even in sleep, the specific careful instinct of someone who knew what mattered to him and didn’t let go of it easily.
I thought about the parking lot in December. Six in the morning, cold asphalt, a man with a knife and a plan I’d been too stubborn and too habitual to avoid walking into.
I thought about the cell on the other end of that night, Cameron’s voice keeping me awake until the sirens arrived.
I thought about all the distance between that morning and this one, the stitches, the recovery, the tournament I’d played through still healing, the long, careful season of bringing things back to where they belonged.
And I looked at the two boys asleep on the bench, stepbrothers in fact now rather than just in practice, and thought that some things turned out to be worth every difficult, frightening step of the distance between the worst morning and the best evening.
Sedona found me there a few minutes later.
She looked at the boys and then at me, reading whatever was on my face the way she always read me, and didn’t say anything, just slipped her hand into mine and stood beside me.
“Good day,” she said eventually certainly but quietly.
23
Wedding Que AllerParty
“Really good day.” I said.
“Should we wake them and put them to bed properly p>
“In a minute,” I said. “Let’s just have another minute p>
Claim
She leaned her head against my shoulder, the party warm and distant behind us, the October garden dark now, the maple a shape against the sky
We stood there, the two of us, watching our sons sleep. One more minute. Then we’d carry them inside, close the day properly, waiting for whater moght came next.
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Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.