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After I got over the initial shock of reconnecting with Shelly and after I had done a bit of soul searching, I knew that I had to be with her. I wanted to be married to her. That was not even a question on my mind anymore. It was just a fact. I was going to propose to her and I hoped that she would happily accept it.
She did. And now we were here getting married in front of what felt like the world, or at least our little world. We had friends from the old station there, both of our families, and even some of our new friends came to support us and celebrate our happiest of days.
The wedding was a fairly small ceremony, nothing crazy or elaborate, even though I told Shelly we could go all out and make it as wonderful and outrageous as we wanted to. In the end we decided that we would just make it quiet, intimate, and a real day to remember. We didn’t need to go wild and spend an insane amount of money or anything.
As the minister said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” I glanced down at our little girl in the front row with Lucy watching on with a sweet smile on her face. I knew that this was the beginning of a wonderful life together. Amber was our little flower girl and she relished the idea of having an important job in the wedding. And she was wonderful, so adorable.
I kissed my new bride softly on the lips after lifting her veil to reveal the most beautiful face I’d ever seen. I held her closely in my arms as the kiss finished and whispered, “I love you, baby.”
“I love you,” she said back to me.
After the wedding ceremony, we changed our clothes into something more comfortable so that we could enjoy the reception properly. There was a great band that we’d hired, who actually let me come up and play a few songs, including a tender ballad I’d written just for Shelly. I’d spent some time working on it in secret and I played it over and over again in rehearsal trying to get it all just right. Shelly loved how I sang to her. She was almost in tears when it was done. “That is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
I kissed her and snuggled her closely to me. “I will sing to you every single day if I have to just to remind you how much I love you, baby.”
I held my sweet bride in my arms as everyone around us cheered us on.
“I knew there was something going on with you two,” Max said to me when I asked him to be my best man. “I couldn’t prove it, but I knew there was something.”
“You didn’t know anything. No one did,” I gloated. It was nice having Max and Richie there with me and to have their blessings. I did notice that Chief Walker and a few of the others from the old station didn’t even respond to the invitation. I could tell that they were bothered by the lies, which was unfortunate. But when you used a silly rule to control people, you shouldn’t be surprised when they deceive you. That was how I felt about it.
Chief Walker was an honorable man in most respects, but by not even responding to the invitation and from some of the rumors I’d heard from the others, he was very angry. “Yeah, he kept talking about betrayal and even staged a whole meeting about it,” Cody said when I asked him. I had to shake my head and laugh. Shelly did, too. It actually made everything seem so funny now. We’d been so scared of being found out because of the power this man had over our lives. That was ridiculous. In fact, this fear had almost cost me everything. It had scared Shelly into running away, and it had kept me from knowing about my daughter for the first two years of her life. It made me angry and it filled me with total derision for Walker. That bastard had caused a lot of pain by pretending to care about others. At the end of the day, it all boiled down to his own fears and inadequacies. He wanted to make himself look like an even more effective chief. That was it.
I had to let it go. There was no point in dwelling on the past. It would just eat you alive with anger. I wouldn’t forget and I would not forgive, but I would stop putting my mental and emotional energies on this. That was one thing I could promise myself.
It wasn’t long before Shelly and I had our first dance as husband and wife. She looked so amazing. It wasn’t just the physical beauty, the clothes, her makeup, and her hair that did it. No, it was her glow. She was truly glowing with life and energy. We both were I believed. At least, I felt like I was. I finally had everything in my life I’d ever wanted, everything I ever thought could make me happy.
“So, here is to the next step, baby,” I said.
“Yes, to the next seventy years or so,” Shelly laughed.
“Seventy? Oh, I’m living may more years than that. I’m not stopping at one hundred. I was thinking more like one fifty, something like that.”
“One fifty? Really? Ok, as long as you keep those abs around, I’ll accept that,” Shelly teased.
“Oh, these abs aren’t going anywhere,” I said. “You can see that.”
I kissed her and hugged her tightly against me. Everything had worked out perfectly for the two of us. I considered myself very lucky. When Shelly went missing, I searched high and low exhaustively, but she didn’t want me to find her. That was obvious, and of course I had no idea why. There were a zillion possible reasons floating around in my head about why she had left, including the idea she might be pregnant, but of course I told myself that she would never do that. I had to admit the idea that she was capable of going to such lengths to keep a secret could have made me nervous, but I understood her mind and the reasoning behind it. She thought she was trying to protect us. That was normal. But we had moved past all of that. We knew each other enough now that we would always be perfectly honest with each other.
I had faith that Shelly would uphold her end of the bargain. I felt so blessed to be married to her now. We had the strongest, most loving family. It was just the three of us, but I thought there would definitely be more babies in our future. I hadn’t talked to Shelly about it yet, but that was something that I definitely wanted. I’d always dreamt of having a big family.
We finished the reception and then went back to our house to get ready to head to the airport. Lucy was going to take care of Amber for the next week while Shelly and I enjoyed ourselves a nice honeymoon. We had decided to go to Paris. Neither of us had ever done much real traveling, and it seemed to be a popular destination that we could cross off the bucket list.
When we were in the car, Shelly placed her hand on mine. “I love you so much. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we are always as happy as we can be.”
“Right back at you, sweetie.”
Epilogue
Shelly
“Oh, I think ate enough to kill a horse,” Gary said as he collapsed on the couch.
We’d just been to some dancing and then dinner afterwards at a great restaurant just down the road. I could not remember the name of the place to save my life, though. The two of us had been in Paris for several days, taking in the sights, doing as much touristy stuff as possible, and meeting some great people as well. The culture was fun and interesting.
I was dead tired now, though. But I was not quite finished with the evening. Our suite was excellent. We had saved long and hard to afford the honeymoon of our dreams and the most important part of that was the honeymoon suite I thought. It had to be big and spacious. It needed to have all of the amenities of home, plus the extras. Ours did.
We had the big screen television, the pool table, the sauna, and the Jacuzzi as well. All of those things had been put to good use the past several days by us. That was the point of a real vacation, I thought. You wanted to leave as much of the old life behind as you possibly could and live like the rich and famous for a bit. It was destroying our little nest egg of savings, but with both of us working we’d be able to save that back in no time. Amber was still small enough that the space of our one story house was fine for us at the time being. Though we would soon be expecting an addition to the family…
