She was beginning to realize that this is what the rest of her life was going to look like from here on out.
He inclined his head, accepting that without argument, and the rest of it passed as it was meant to, the formal words spoken and answered, the necessary acknowledgments made without hesitation.
“I pronounce you Man and Wife. You may kiss your wife.”
There was the faintest shift of attention, and Harper stepped forward without hesitation, closing the small distance between them. The kiss was brief, but it meant everything to her.
Whatever order had carried the ceremony dissolved almost at once, voices returning in overlapping strands, movement breaking through the careful arrangement as people stood. Temperance barely had time to register it before Albina was in front of her.
“Well,” Albina said, looking at her first, and then at Harper, “I do hope you are both content, because I have been waiting an unreasonable amount of time to be proven correct.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said nothing,” Albina continued, as though that clarified everything, “which you may now appreciate was a considerable act of restraint on my part.”
“That does not explain what you believe you have been correct about,” Temperance said.
Albina gave a small, almost impatient exhale, as though she had expected this to be understood without requiring articulation.
“You,” she said, with a brief, precise gesture between Temperance and Harper, “and this. It was obvious. You wereboth behaving in a manner that made any alternative outcome highly unlikely, and I chose, quite deliberately, not to involve myself in it.”
Temperance tilted her head slightly.
“That must have been difficult for you.”
“It was intolerable,” Albina said. “At several points, I considered intervening.”
Harper, who had been silent until now, said mildly, “You trusted the outcome.”
Albina looked at him then, properly, as though reassessing him in light of the fact that he had now said something she found worth answering.
“I trusted that interference would have made it worse,” she said.
“Well,” Charity’s voice cut in, appearing at Temperance’s side with the precise timing of someone who had been waiting for an opening and had decided she had waited long enough, “if this is to be a discussion about who knew what and when, I feel it only fair to say that the rest of us were considerably less patient about it.”
“You were not patient at all,” Alethea added, joining them, her gaze moving over Temperance in quick assessment beforereturning to her face. “You made a spectacle of it on several occasions.”
“I did no such thing,” Charity said.
“You absolutely did.”
Temperance looked between them.
“I was not aware that I was being observed to this degree.”
“You were not meant to be aware,” Charity said. “That is rather the point of observation.”
A child pushed past them then, nearly colliding with Alethea before being caught and redirected without breaking the flow of conversation, the room already shifting into something louder.
“You see,” Charity continued, undeterred, “we have all endured this with remarkable composure, and I think it only fair that we be acknowledged for it.”
Albina made a small sound, one that suggested she had reached the limit of what she was willing to tolerate from all of them at once.
“This is not a discussion that requires continuation,” she said. “There are guests waiting, and if you do not turn your attentionto them immediately, they will begin approaching in a manner that lacks all structure.”
“They have already begun,” Charity said, glancing past her.
Indeed, they had.
