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And yet she couldn’t stop that feeling. When Adonis reached out and took her hands the wave of need that washed over her was like something she hadn’t felt since she was a child.

She had been walking down the street once, and had looked through a window and seen a family sitting around the dinner table. The whole scene had been warm. It would’ve been painfully benign to most people, but to her it was something magical. Like something from a fantasy.

The need, jealousy, longing that had gripped her then had been so visceral and strong it had frightened her.

She felt an echo of it now. Looking at him, at their hands on the way they were joined, she…

It took her breath away. This need for something that she knew she could never have.

And when he began to make vows for her in that low familiar voice, she thought she might die.

She would never have felt sympathy for herself. If she looked now she was almost certain that she would see her twelve-year-old self sitting in the front row of this wedding.

How much money did you waste throwing a big party like this? How much you have and you’re still unhappy?

You’re letting a man decide your feelings about anything?

Judgment. Judgment.

But what that little girl didn’t understand was that while survival was of course essential, the reason she had been so immobilized by the sight of that family at a dinner table was that there was one thing money couldn’t fix. One thing it couldn’t buy.

It could do nothing about the horrendous, aching loneliness that lived inside of you.

That wasn’t a scene that could be purchased, any more than buying all of the accoutrements for the wedding could inject it with real feeling. But the thing that it was missing.

Perhaps that was the real thing she understood now.

Or maybe it was simply that humans didn’t know how to be happy.

That they would find fault with wherever they were, whatever they were. All across time, forever.

No.

It was deeper than that. She knew it.

She knew.

It was that one thing that eluded her. The deep, real connection that she wanted.

And there was a certain sort of futility to having everything that you could ever want materially, and still being without that.

“I do,” he said.

And it was her turn to say all the right things. So she said them. But she found, horrendously, that she really meant them. When she said “I do,” it was like she had taken the truth of all those words and carved them directly onto her heart. A wound that Adonis would never be able to stitch back together.

She did love him.

She had. Maybe for most of her life.

Maybe from the moment she had first looked up at him when she had been out on the streets that first night. He had been so strong, so brave. The most wonderful, beautiful boy she had ever seen.

Her feelings might have been innocent then, they might have shifted and changed, but they weren’t really different feelings. They had been the truth of her ever since that moment.

She was afraid they would be her truth forever.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

They could kiss. They could kiss except they had decided that they wouldn’t. Except now they had to because they had put together a wedding and Alex had invited everybody.