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Forgiveness was not always the easier path. It was spiky and it stung as you trod on old hurts and raged internally.
‘It’s not worth it, Aurora,’ Nico had said as he’d held her hands and she had sobbed in frustration.
And she had looked up to a master. She had looked up to and learned from a man who had been beaten, but who had risen.
Yes, forgiveness was a spiky path, but if you pushed on and through it you got to those bulrushes, waiting to be snapped so that a million seeds of kindness could escape…
And so, instead of pointing out the hurts her father had caused, when Bruno said he had always known Nico was the one for his daughter, Aurora smiled and agreed. ‘You did always say that, Pa.’
It was better to be kind today.
And it was easy to be happy.
Especially when Nadia and Antonio ran in, laughing, carrying a small posy of the freshly picked wild flowers that Aurora would carry.
‘You look pretty,’ Nadia said.
‘So do you,’ Aurora said. She smiled and looked at Antonio. ‘And you look so handsome! Your mamma is going to be so proud when she sees you at the temple ruins.’
Nico had arranged for them to come to the wedding, and they were both Aurora’s flower-pickers and her little escorts on the walk to the temple.
And as she walked towards the ruins on her father’s arm the resentment slid away, for there was nowhere more calming nor more beautiful than the temple ruins at sunset…
Aurora had been absolutely right about the staff uniforms, because Persian Orange was the colour of this night.
As well as cinnamon, and gold, plus a thousand unnamed shades of orange with which the sky blazed.
And orange did not give Nico a headache tonight.
Pino nudged him needlessly, to say that his bride was here.
Her dress was white, and fell in heavy drapes, and to Nico she looked like a goddess walking towards him.
Aurora cared not for the eyebrow-raises of certain people in the village, who were clucking behind their hands at the audacity of a single mother wearing white.
It was her wedding.
The day of which she had dreamt.
Only it was better than her dreams. For in those they had not been at the temple, and Nico had not smiled at his bride the way he did on this day approaching night.
In her earlier dreams Nico had been a whole lot younger and perhaps, she conceded, just a touch less certain. On this new night and for evermore she was his chosen one. Of that she was ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain.
The whisper of doubt was so tiny in comparison that sense and hope combined to make her believe that Nico wanted this just as much as she did.
‘Aurora and Nico,’ said the celebrant, ‘we stand today amidst these ancient ruins to celebrate your unending love.’
And it was both unending and without a clear beginning, for neither could quite pin down when their love had commenced.
When she’d used to open the door and tease him with ‘Hello, husband’?
Or when Nico had denied to himself the fact that tears had pooled in her eyes when he had told her he would never marry?
Had there been love there that night on her father’s sofa?
And had it returned again on the night Gabe had been made?
Or had it never left them?
