Olive and grape. Two sides of the same coin. One bore fruit from stone; the other from sun and water. One was bitter, twisted, gnarled, resilient. The other bloomed soft and sweet, coaxed gently toward harvest.
Rivals in nature, bound in cultivation.
Split like enemies, drawn together in the center of the orbit we created.
It was symbolic in ways I hadn’t expected, this grove. These vines. This marriage.
And I realized maybe I wasn’t being “given away” in the traditional sense. I was giving myself—fully, wholly, fearlessly—to the only man who’d ever held my heart and never broken it. Only helped it beat stronger.
I waited for loneliness to hit, to ache for the absence of my father walking me down the aisle. But as I adjusted my veil andtook my first barefoot step forward, I realized I didn’t feel lost. I felt found.
Suddenly, I understood.
This walk wasn’t about being given away. It was about being seen. Beingcelebrated. Beingloved.
And as I stepped forward barefoot, dress whispering against the earth, veil catching the breeze behind me, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything at all.
Every broken step that led to here. Every scar, every sacrifice, every lonely night, every defiant scream. This wasmywalk. The journey I’d taken on my own, through grief and glory and every aching inch of self-discovery. Where I rebuilt myself from the ground up and found my identity in the wreckage.
I had grown into the woman who now walked—unshaking, unbowed—toward everything she had ever wanted.
And there Callum was, at the end of the aisle with his back to me, down the row of olive trees and golden light, a man I had idolized, then yearned for, and now loved with every fiber of my being stood waiting to become my husband.
By grace. By fate. By fire.
I was ready.
Sunlight glittered through the canopy, a breeze lifting the veil at my back just enough to make me believe in fate, as if it hadn’t carried me here on purpose. Like it hadn’t put me exactly where I was always meant to land.
Up ahead, the boys and Ivy waited beneath the simple wood arch, draped with ivory fabric, fluttering in the wind. Pink peonies and olive branches twined into soft loops, framed by the Aegean behind them, glittering like a second sky.
Marco stood tall, anddefinitelycrying, though he tried to hide it by pretending to squint against the sun. Kimi was composed, but his hand was subtly resting on Marco’s shoulder like a tether.
Ivy clutched her bouquet to her chest and mouthed “don’t trip” with tears in her eyes and the grin of someone who’d never seen me shine so bright.
The music swelled, Lucy’s voice lifting, soft and slow, the guitar humming like a heartbeat behind her.
Hands trembling, heartbeat racing, grin splitting my face in half… and all of me burning with the kind of love that survived the crash.
Every hard thing we’d survived softened at the edge, even thelighthad decided to be kind.
And Callum Fraser—my idol, my champion, the king of my goddamn heart—turned.
The ridge fell awayin front of me, a magnificent slash of Aegean blue that looked too still, too perfect to be real. I stood there with my hands clasped in front of me, trying to hold myself together when I could feel every nerve vibrating. My palms were slick. My pulse was wilder than the vines my soon-to-be wife was in awe of.
Lucy’s voice drifted up from behind me, slow and sure, each lyric cutting straight through my chest. The world had gone quiet for her, for this moment. Even the wind seemed to listen.
If fate is a myth / I’ll still thank the stars
For every scar / and every crash
That line—Christ. It hit me harder than the 48 G-force crash in Montreal.
Auri was every scar I carried. And every crash I survived. She was the reason I got back up.
Because she had given meeverything. Her trust, even when I didn’t deserve it. Her fury when the world tried to break her. Her grace when mine faltered. Her wild defiance, the fire in her blood that matched mine. Her stubborn hope. Her impossible, endless heart.
She handed me every part of herself like it wasn’t something I had to earn, but something she’d always meant to give. She gave me her faith when mine was gone. She gave me her fight when I didn’t think I had any left. Hell—she gave me breath again, steady and sure andmine, after I’d spent years choking on expectations, on silence, on ghosts I couldn’t outrun.
