Chapter forty-one
Epilogue: George - One Year Later
The stadium is already full when we step inside. The noise is rolling up from the field, lights cutting through the early evening haze, the kind of energy that feels less like a crowd and more like a weather system.
I take it in automatically. Layout. Movement. Pressure points.
Tessa is looking up at the nearest screen with her mouth slightly open, and I make myself stop calculating.
"It's bigger than I imagined," she says, not to me specifically. Just to the air, to the scale of it.
The woman to my left is wearing a Lila Hart tour shirt from 2019 and vibrating at a frequency I can feel through the plastic seat. Tessa pulls out her phone and frames a shot of the stage, tilting it left, then right, dissatisfied with both.
"We're technically here as ERS representatives," I say.
She lowers the phone and gives me a look. The kind that means she knows exactly what I’m doing and finds it only mildly irritating.
Two rows ahead, a man in a Camden Drake jersey has his arm around a woman in full Lila concert gear, and neither of them looks even remotely troubled by the contradiction. The screens shift to a slow-motion highlight reel starting with their first public appearance, the staged proposal photo, a dozen candid shots from the past year. Tessa goes quiet in a way that means she is actually feeling something. I notice the line of her jaw, the way she’s tucked her hair behind one ear on the left side only, like she’s started the gesture and abandoned it halfway.
The girl directly behind us hisses, “She’s a hundred percent pregnant,” with the conviction of someone presenting peer-reviewed evidence.
“You don’t actually know that,” her companion says.
“They’ve been secretly married for months, and her team hasn’t denied it.” A pause. “That settles it.”
Tessa leans slightly closer and says, quietly, “They’re keeping it private for now.”
She turns to look at me as she says it, close enough that I register the exact shade of her eyes under the stadium lights.
“Of course you know,” I say. Not surprised. Just fond in a way that does something inconvenient to my chest.
The lights drop by half and the crowd noise surges upward like a pressure change in a cabin. A single spotlight finds the stage and fifty thousand people make a sound that is less cheering and more collective exhaling, like they have all been holding it since they walked through the gates. I watch Tessa’s hand come up to her sternum without her seeming to notice she has done it.
Lila appears at the far end of the stage walk and the noise becomes something structural. Something you feel in the back of your teeth.
I look at Camden instead.
He goes completely still. There is no performance in it, no awareness of the cameras finding his face. Nothing calibrated for an audience of fifty thousand or the forty million watching the broadcast. He is only looking at her.
Tessa reaches over and finds my hand in the dark, not looking at me, her eyes still on the stage.
I turn my palm up to make it easier for her to hold.
The vows begin.
You make the world quieter.
I watch Camden’s expression confirm that this is specifically, only, entirely for Lila.
I trust you with the parts of me I don’t show anyone else.
Lila’s voice carries clean and steady across the stadium, and the girl behind us has stopped talking completely. Tessa’s thumb moves once across my knuckle, absently, like she isn’t tracking it.
I am tracking it.
I feel safe choosing you.
Something in that particular construction snags in my thinking. The verb tense of it. The present continuous of choosing rather than the clean finality of chose. Not a decision made once and filed away. A decision that keeps being made, renewed each time, without the comfort of being settled.
