Mine.
The thought planted itself in the center of my chest and bloomed outward like something feral and entirely unannounced, pressing up against the inside of my ribs with a force that had no business being there. It was the sheer shock of it—the rawness, the want underneath it—that made me stop.
Because, sure, I’d had the occasional passing thought about what it might be like to kiss Ellie Granger. She was my best friend, and she was also an objectively attractive woman. I wasn’t dead or indifferent to basic observable facts. But evenon the rare occasions when some errant spark flickered up and a half-formed thought started to take shape, I stamped it down without ceremony and moved on. We’d made an agreement about that a long time ago, back when we were old enough to understand what we’d be risking.
And somewhere in the last thirty seconds, without any consultation, we’d gone and changed things.
I pulled back far enough to breathe, just enough to see—and for one suspended, impossible moment we were still close enough that I could make out every detail: the faint flush that painted her cheekbones, the slight unevenness of her breathing, the way she was assembling her composure in real time, piece by careful piece, her expression doing that thing where it went still and controlled before she decided how to feel about something. I knew that look. I’d seen it a hundred times. I was, I suspected, wearing a version of it myself. Neither of us said a single word.
“Well, hallelujah!” Gus’s voice resonated with the satisfaction of a man whose life’s work had just been vindicated, and I dropped my hands and straightened with a laugh. Ellie laughed too, the real one, a little unsteady at the edges, and the moment folded itself away into the category of things I was absolutely going to return to later when I had the privacy to do it properly.
Reverend Aldean was already in motion, practical and unhurried, the way she’d been since she’d opened her office door and listened to our situation without batting an eye. “I’ll need the license signed before I go,” she said, and stepped to the doorway and spoke to someone in the hall. A minute later, a nurse appeared, nodded, and disappeared again. Reverend Aldean came back into the room and we all waited with the suspended quality of people who have just done something significant and are waiting for normal life to resume.
It resumed in the form of Donna.
Donna was from hospital administration and carried a notary stamp on her keychain. Her placid expression told me she’d been recruited for an unusual errand on her lunch break and was being professional about it. She set up at the small table under the window, produced the stamp with the efficiency of long practice, and looked at us in expectation.
Gus observed all of this from his pillows with the satisfaction of a man overseeing the completion of a project he’d had in mind for quite some time.
I signed first.Daniel James Costello, in the box next toGroom. The pen felt oddly heavy in my hand. Not bad, exactly. Just consequential. Real in a way that was distinct from the ceremony, which had been real in a different register entirely. This was ink. This was a document with our names on it, and a notary stamp, and a witness signature. This was a thing that existed in the world independently of either of us. We were going to intercept it before it got anywhere near a filing cabinet, but standing here looking at my signature dry on the line I felt the full strange weight of it settle across my shoulders.
Ellie signed next toBride, with the careful cursive she’d honed since grade school, all clean angles and deliberate curves. I watched her do it and thought about what she’d said during the vows—I’d rather figure it out with you than without you—and the way she’d said it, like something she hadn’t entirely planned to say that had come out true anyway. Which was its own category of information that I was not going to examine right now in this hospital room under Gus’s hawk-sharp gaze.
Donna notarized. Reverend Aldean had Gus sign as witness and tucked the license into the folder she’d brought. “I’ll take care of getting this where it needs to go,” she said.
“Oh, no,” Ellie protested. “I was already planning to drop it back off when we left.”
The chaplain shrugged in asuit yourselfkind of way and wished us congratulations.
After she and Donna departed, the room settled into something quieter and easier. Gus reached out and put one hand over Ellie’s where it rested on the bed rail and one over mine, and he looked at us both, and he said, “Your grandmother would have loved this. She always knew too, you know. Even before I did.”
Ellie made the sound she made when she was not crying by a margin that was doing its best.
I turned my hand over under his and held on.
We stayed for another hour. Gus was more himself than he’d been since the stroke. Color had come back into his face. He had opinions about everything—the ceremony, the ring, the sea otters I’d apparently mentioned in my vows and which he found extremely relevant to some larger point he was developing about the importance of paying attention to what was right in front of you. At one point he delivered a brief but thorough retrospective on every piece of evidence he’d accumulated over the years that we were, as he always put it, cosmically intended, working his way forward with the systematic precision of a man who’d been building this case for decades and was glad to finally have occasion to present it in full.
“The barbecue festival,” he said at one point.
Ellie looked at me. I looked at Ellie.
“That was a navigation error,” I said.
“That,” Gus said with great certainty, “was the universe keeping you together for an extra two hours because it knew what it was doing even if you didn’t.”
“That is an extremely generous interpretation of me getting the date wrong by a week,” I said.
“I have a lot of them,” he said. “I’ve had years to develop them.”
Ellie was laughing, her legs tucked up on the edge of his bed, her shoulder against his, the ring catching the thin afternoon light coming through the blinds. There was still something careful in her eyes, something held back, the way there always was when she was processing more than she was showing. But she looked lighter than she had in the waiting room yesterday, lighter than she’d looked at the kitchen table this morning with the cold tea and the duck pajama pants and the sleepless night sitting in her eyes.
I’d done that. Or Gus had, or the plan had, or some combination of all three.
It was enough for right now.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
I already knew before I looked. Station, flashing on the screen, and I looked at Ellie and she looked back at me unsurprised that the universe had chosen this exact moment to reassert the existence of normal life.
