Chloe and Tiana are at the altar, bouquets in hand, Chloe's mascara already a lost cause.
My father's grip on my arm tightens slightly as the music begins and the guests rise, I look down the aisle and find Axel.
He's watching me.
He has been since the doors opened, probably before, and the look on his face is one I have never seen on it before. Not Something entirely new, unguarded, and enormous, and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on a human face.
That look is mine,I think, walking toward it.That is completely mine.
My father places my hand in Axel's, and for a moment, the three of us exist in a small triangle of complicated history and hard-won peace. Axel looks at my father. My father looks at Axel. Something passes between them, wordless and sufficient.
My father steps back.
Axel looks at me.
"Hi," he says quietly, meant only for me.
"Hi," I say back.
He squeezes my hand once, then we face forward, the ceremony begins, and I spend most of it trying not to cry, failing moderately, and not minding at all.
Later, when the dancing has been going for two hours, and Chloe has somehow convinced Sergei onto the floor, which is something I will be processing for years, Axel finds me at the edge of the garden.
He comes up behind me, arms around my waist, chin at my temple. My stomach is genuinely enormous now, round and insistent, and his hands settle over it automatically, the way they always do.
The baby kicks.
Axel makes the small satisfied sound he always makes when that happens, like he's won something.
"What are you doing out here?" he murmurs.
I pull the folded paper from the small hidden pocket Tiana insisted the seamstress add, because Tiana knows me better than I know myself. I unfold it.
The bucket list. Soft at the creases now, the ink faded in places. I read through it in the evening light.
Willingly lose virginity.Done, to put it mildly.
See the Northern Lights.Done, on a hillside with private security and a thermos and a man who remembered I wanted it.
Swim naked in the ocean.Done, in a cove at midnight.
I look at the ones that aren't crossed off. Japan. Skydiving. The tattoo.
Axel reads over my shoulder. "We're going to Japan," he says. "After she's born."
"You don't know it's a she."
"I know."
"Its a boy."
He ignores this completely. "I'll take you skydiving if you stop arguing with me about the baby's gender."
"That's not a compromise, that's a threat."
"Same thing in my world."
I laugh, and pull the pen from the same pocket, and at the bottom of the list, below everything else, I write one final item.
