The Spanish sunis relentless and perfect, casting everything in that golden Mediterranean light.
I'm standing in front of a mirror in a small room overlooking the sea, adjusting my bow tie for what has to be the fourth time now and somehow managing to make it worse with each attempt.
My hands won't stop shaking.
Not from nerves, exactly—not from doubt or fear or second-guessing what's about to happen.
Just from the sheer weight of this moment finally arriving after years of wondering if it ever would.
Three years we've been walking toward this day. We would have done it sooner, but Nora's film production took almost a year, then she moved back to Eden and decided she wanted to keep Gracie's Bookstore alive after all, which meant renovation and inventory and learning how to run a business she'd inherited from someone who'd believed in us before we believed in ourselves. Time just kept slipping away from us, though not in a bad way. Not in the way it used to, when distance and silence made every day feel like losing ground.
This time it was just life. The good kind. The kind whereyou're so busy building something real that you forget to make the symbolic gestures official.
Not that we needed official. We've been committed to each other in every way that matters since the night she showed up at Westbrook and didn't leave.
But still.
This feels important. This feels like closing a chapter that's been open since we were kids, and finally starting the one we've been too scared to write.
And now we're here.
In Málaga, where it all started seven years ago when we were twenty-two and stupid and so convinced we were inevitable that we didn't realize how much work inevitable actually takes.
The door opens behind me and Nick walks in, looking annoyingly put-together in his grey suit, sunglasses pushed up on his head like he just stepped off a yacht.
"You look constipated," he says by way of greeting.
I flip him off without turning around.
"Thanks. Very helpful."
"Seriously though." He comes up beside me and takes the bow tie out of my hands before I can destroy it completely. "You're making this harder than it needs to be. It's a tie, not a crisis."
He fixes it in three smooth movements—the kind of effortless competence that's always made me simultaneously grateful and irritated that he's better at this stuff than I am.
"There," he says, patting my chest once. "Now you look almost presentable."
"Almost?"
"Well, you're still you." He grins. "But Nora seems to like that about you, so I guess it works."
I look at myself in the mirror, trying to see what she sees.
The face staring back is older than the last time I stood in this city, but softer too. Less haunted. The kind of face that comes from seven years sober and three years of waking up next tosomeone who makes you want to be better without making you feel like you're not already enough.
"You ready?" Nick asks, and his voice has gentled in that way it does when he knows I'm processing something bigger than the moment.
"Yeah," I say, and I mean it with everything I have. "I'm well past ready."
He squeezes my shoulder once—firm and brief and full of things we don't need to say out loud.
"Let's get you married then," he says.
The ceremony is seton a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean—the same stretch of coastline where we walked seven years ago, where I picked up a pebble and enlightend her about how penguins mate for life when the female accepts the pebble.
Twenty chairs are arranged in a small semi-circle facing the sea.
Just family and the friends who've become family over the years. The people who held us together when we couldn't hold ourselves.
