Penny and Jules each came forward to read a poem. They’d been the ones to help us find them, the four of us around my kitchen table a month ago with Declan’s laptop open and Penny reading them aloud in different voices until we found the ones that sounded like something we recognized. The memory of it made me smile. I had thought it would be a hard exercise and it had turned out to be one of my favorite afternoons of the year.
Jules read hers and then, before she stepped back, she did something I hadn’t expected.
She reached under the seat next to Bridger and brought out the lucky pillow.
Not to read from it. Not to explain it. She just set it on the empty chair beside Bridger, where it had always belonged, the embroidered green fabric bright under the fairy lights. “In this house, we bleed green.” A pillow April Kingman had madewith her own hands, for a house full of children she’d never see grown.
Jules went back to stand next to Declan. She didn’t look at anyone. Her chin was up and she was absolutely not crying, in exactly the same way Declan was absolutely not crying, which told me everything about where Jules Kingman had learned how to hold herself together.
I looked at Bridger.
His hand had moved to rest his arm on April’s pillow, not quite holding it, just touching it. He caught me looking and something passed between us that I didn’t have words for yet. The closest I could get was: I see her too. She’s here.
He gave me the smallest nod.
I looked back at my soon-to-be husband.
He was watching the exchange between me and his dad. And whatever he read on my face made him blink, once, hard, and bring my hands up and press them against his chest for just a moment. Like he needed the anchor.
I understood.
I squeezed back.
“Okay,” Everett said quietly. “I think it’s time for these two to tell each other what they’ve been trying to say for the last year and a half.” He cleared his throat. “Declan.”
Declan looked at me. He was quiet for a long moment, which was his way, and I had learned to wait in his quiet the same way you wait for the last note of a song to fully fade before you start the next one.
“The first time I saw you,” he started, “I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And then I actually met you, and it turned out that was the least interesting thing about you, by a long margin.” Something shifted in his face. “I spent a lot of years being very quiet and figuring nobody really minded. Andthen you came along and it turned out I’d just been waiting for someone worth talking to.”
He paused. “You see the things I don’t say. I don’t know how you do it. I haven’t figured that out. But I don’t want you to stop.” His voice dropped a register. “You are my north star. The thing I find first in any sky. I am going to spend the rest of my life navigating by you, and I want you to know that I know exactly what I’m asking for.”
After a short breath he really hit home. “Which is everything. I’m asking for everything.” A beat. “I promise to give you the same.”
I was crying. I was absolutely crying. So was Jules, despite her best efforts, and Hayes had both hands over his mouth, and Everett looked like he was doing math in his head to keep himself together, which was very Everett of him.
Declan wiped my face again. I caught his hand and held it against my cheek for one second.
Then I took a breath like I was preparing for the bridge of the song of my life.
“You know I write songs for a living,” I said. “So you would think vows would be the easy part.” I heard a small ripple of laughter. “You would be wrong. I have written and deleted them approximately forty times. Because everything I wanted to say kept turning into something too big, too much, and I kept having to pull it back.”
I looked at him. “So I’m going to say the simple version, because it’s also the true version, which is that before you, I was very good at performing love. I knew all the right chords. I just didn’t know what the song actually sounded like.”
I felt my voice go unsteady and steadied it. “You showed me. You did that in a hospital room in Aspen when you didn’t have to be there, and in a cabin on this mountain when you sat with me while I figured out what I was made of, and in a thousand quietmoments after that when you just kept showing up, exactly as you are, and letting me be exactly as I am.” I squeezed his hands. “Your arms are the only place I have ever felt safe to be myself. And I am never leaving.”
One last beat into the best crescendo ever. “I promise to love you and to keep showing you what the song sounds like. Together. For the rest of our lives.”
Everett handed us each a ring, which he did with unusual solemnity for a man who everyone had seen in his underpants, even if it was on a billboard ad for Knightwear in Times Square.
I slid Declan’s ring onto his finger. He slid mine onto mine, and then held my hand for one moment, looking at it, like he was taking inventory of this specific version of the world.
“By the power invested in me by the internet and the great state of Colorado,” Everett said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” He grinned. “Kiss that girl, Declan.”
Declan cupped my face in both hands.
And then he kissed me, and the northern lights rippled overhead, and sixty people cheered, somewhere at the front of the aisle Wiener the Pooh let out three sharp barks of enthusiastic approval.
And then it started snowing.
