"I'll keep saying it until you stop looking surprised."
The ceremony is simple. Short vows. Nothing scripted, nothing performed. The officiant speaks and the words wash over me, but the only voice I hear clearly is Rafferty's when he says his part. Low, steady, certain. The voice of a man who means every word and has never learned how to say things he doesn't mean.
When the rings go on, my hands don't shake.
When he kisses me, the garden erupts. Clapping, cheering, Timofey whistling loudly enough to earn a sharp look from my mother. Saoirse is openly sobbing. Iris is laughing and crying at the same time. Katya claps and then winces and presses her hand to her belly and Killian is immediately crouching beside her with concern etched across his face. She swats him away.
Rafferty pulls back from the kiss and rests his forehead against mine.
"Wife," he says. Quiet enough that only I hear it.
"Husband."
His mouth curves. That almost-smile I've come to love. The one that says more than most people's whole faces.
The reception is in the house. Long tables in the dining room, overflowing with food Saoirse has been cooking for three days. Wine and whiskey and toasts that range from eloquent to barely coherent. Liam speaks first, measured and warm, and says something about Rafferty finally coming home that makes the brothers go quiet for a moment before Connor breaks the tension with a joke I don't catch but that makes Aidan choke on his drink.
My father speaks. He's brief, which is unlike him, and his voice cracks once, which is even more unlike him. He says he prayed for a man who would love his daughter the way she deserved. He says he believes that prayer was answered. Rafferty reaches under the table and squeezes my hand so hard his healing knuckles must scream, but he doesn't flinch.
Iris gives an unofficial toast that's mostly a roast of Rafferty's inability to dress himself, buy groceries, or function without someone reminding him to eat. She ends it by looking straight at me and saying, "Thank you for taking him off our hands. We love him desperately but he's exhausting."
The laughter carries through the room like warmth.
I dance with my father. He holds me the way he did when I was small, one hand on my back, the other clasped around my fingers. He hums along with the music, slightly off key, and I press my face into his shoulder and breathe in the smell of his aftershave and think about all the things I didn’t think he knew.
"I'm proud of you, sweetheart," he says.
"For getting married?"
"For being happy. You haven't been happy in a long time. A father notices these things, even when his daughter thinks he doesn't."
I pull back and look at him. His eyes are steady and knowing and I wonder, again, if he understood more than I gave him credit for. Not necessarily the details, but the shape of it. The shadow it cast.
"I'm happy now, Dad."
"I know." He kisses my forehead. "That's all I ever wanted."
Rafferty cuts in. My father gives him a look that's equal parts warning and approval, the universal expression of a man handing his daughter to another man and trusting him not to break her.
"Take care of her," my father says.
"Always," Rafferty says. And he means it the way he means everything. Completely.
We dance. His hand on my lower back, mine on his shoulder. He's a terrible dancer. Stiff, slightly offbeat, concentrating on his feet like they're enemy combatants he needs to outmaneuver. I love it.
"You're overthinking it," I tell him.
"I'm trying not to step on your dress,” he grumbles.
"It's fine. Step on it."
"Your mother will kill me."
"My mother loves you. She told me this morning you remind her of my father."
Something moves across his face. Surprise, maybe. Or the quiet shock of being compared to a good man by a good woman. "Your father is a better man than I am."
"My father didn't drive through the night to destroy someone who was hurting me."
