When Anna opened the door of Orenda and we stepped out onto the porch together, my heart steadied at the sight of Bishop, the man I would spend the rest of my life with, waiting for me.
Steadiness came naturally to him. He calculated before he moved, and once he moved, he didn’t stop. He was the man who’d lifted abeam off me inside a building that was coming down around us, and returned inside to rescue others, knowing it might collapse at any minute. He was the man who’d built the architecture of the Genesis Consortium on a whiteboard in ten minutes on the worst morning of my life, then sat down without pointing at what he’d done, because his intelligence was the kind that didn’t announce itself.
He was patient, never demanding before I was ready to give, never asking me for the more I didn’t know I had but that he saw in me.
Honesty, decency, and honor were part of who he was. Innately. When I asked him a question, he didn’t hedge. He answered. Truthfully. There hadn’t been a single moment when I hadn’t known he saw me as his equal. He respected my intelligence, capability, and strength without being threatened by them, yet he somehow knew when I needed to let my guard down, to give into my fear and doubt, letting me know, without words, that he’d be there to hold me together when I did.
Bishop loved me. He wanted me, openly, constantly,without apology.
When he said the words, I knew he meant them, that there were no conditions attached to them, and he’d never stop loving me.
Anna tightened her hand on my arm, and as we made our way down the porch steps, hers wasn’t the only presence I felt beside me. My grandmother was here too. She’d been with me all morning, from the moment I woke from a dream of her to when I put on the dress that she wore when she married Mikhail, which Anna had given me the day Bishop and I told her we’d set our wedding date. It had been sitting in the bottom drawer of the dresser in my babushka’s bedroom, wrapped in tissue paper and waiting for me, just like her ring had been. My ring now.
I could hear her voice as I walked across the grass to the man waiting for me. “The soul knows,” she said.
And mine did.
