Chapter 12:

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The shouting reached us through the glass doors for about thirty seconds before a security guard appeared from somewhere and the noise stopped.

“My sister,” Thane said, once the doors had closed behind us. “She mentioned the date to someone at dinner. I’ll deal with it.”

The registry process took twenty minutes. A clerk, two forms, a witness signature from Callum who had been waiting inside with Petra, reading a magazine with the calm of a man who had expected this exact situation and come prepared. We came out as husband and wife into the cold bright morning, and Thane bought coffee from a cart outside because neither of us had eaten, and we stood on the pavement drinking it while the city moved around us.

“That was Cedric on the pavement outside, wasn’t it,” Thane said.

“I think so.”

“He was crying.”

“Yes.”

We drank our coffee. There was nothing much to say about it.

The wedding was six months later, in Bellhaven, at a venue with a long formal name that everyone shortened to the Meridian. The kind of wedding where the flowers take a week to arrange and the guest list has its own spreadsheet. The elite of Bellhaven, Thane’s family’s entire social circle, and from Highcrest a contingent of people I had known for years who arrived looking slightly stunned, as if they had misread the invitation and were still processing the upgrade.

рo𝘱𝗎𝗅𝘢r s𝘵𝘰𝗋і𝘦s 𝘰𝗻 𝗀𝗮𝗹nо𝘃𝗲𝘭s.𝖼оm

“I had no idea,” said a woman I had studied with, gripping my arm in the reception line. “You never said anything.”

“There was nothing to say.”

“Mrs. Eddington,” she said, trying the name out. “I am going to need you to look after me from now on.”

“I will see what I can do.”

Callum found me before the ceremony. “Final update from Highcrest, for what it is worth.” He had the tone of a man closing a file. “Isolde took a paternity test. Cedric is the father. He accepted it — they registered the marriage, no ceremony. Apparently the marriage itself has been one long argument. There was a bad fight a few weeks ago and she lost the pregnancy.” He looked down at his shoes. “Then they divorced.”

I stayed with that for a moment. There was no version of that story that felt good to hear.

“I’m sorry for her,” I said. I meant it in a limited way, but I meant it.

Callum nodded. He seemed to mean it too, in the same limited way.

Then Thane’s sister appeared to tell me the ceremony was starting in five minutes and had I seen Thane because he had gone somewhere and no one could find him, which turned out to be untrue — he was already at the end of the aisle, talking to the officiant, and he had clearly been there for a while. He was the kind of person who arrived early to everything. I had been learning this about him.

He turned when I came in. He looked at me the way he had looked at me on the plane — not performing anything, just looking. Then he messed up slightly, stepping to the wrong side on the first approach, and the officiant had to redirect him, and the people in the first few rows laughed. Thane laughed too, which was the right response.

When he lifted the veil, he held it for a second before he moved it, like he was making sure of something.

“I will always love you,” he said.

He had been saying it since we were nine years old. He had just been saying it without words.

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The End.

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Message from Noa: Have a pretty good Friday dear readers, God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (ɔO‿=)ɔ ♥

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