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His friend.
His wife.
She was carrying a bright bouquet of flowers that he recognized from the garden here at Sullivan’s Point. Brilliant early spring blooms that ran the gamut from red to pink to purple. An explosion of the beauty they enjoyed here, held right in the palms of her hands.
Somehow it was just so apt.
And when she arrived to where he stood, he took her hand and drew her to him. “You’re beautiful.”
She looked up at him, her blue eyes glittering. “So are you.”
They didn’t have anyone standing up with them and yet, he felt like everyone was standing up with them. Everyone who had brought them to this place. Everyone who had helped him get here so that he’dlived. So that he didn’t become the same raging asshole his father was.
He didn’t know the pastor who was doing the service. Because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever been in a church, and even when he had, it had been Catholic, and at the behest of his mother, so it certainly hadn’t been a casual event.Thispastor was wearing sandals like it wasn’t fifty-eight degrees outside.
But the service was nice and short. Sweet, without being a full-on sermon. There was something about that moment. About the tradition of it that filled in cracks in his soul he didn’t know were there.
They’d had nothing traditional growing up. Their holidays had been scattered, angry affairs. Their mother had left one year right around Christmas.
They hadn’t had birthday parties.
Their house hadn’t been safe.
It had been a minefield. One wrong step and they detonated their father’s rage.
Tradition wasn’t something they were allowed.
Their legacy was pain. Violence.
But they were making a new one. In this simple moment in the barn, where he and Charity spoke words to each other that people had said back and forth over an altar for hundreds of years... That felt like something real. It felt like something good. Like something infinitely possible to build a life from. Something bigger than they were.
And he damn well needed something bigger than he was.
“For richer or poorer,” he said. “In sickness and in health. Till death do us part. With this ring I take you as my wife.” He slid the wedding band onto her finger, the companion to the sparkly rock he’d given her just last week.
It was his turn to be surprised when she produced a wedding band for him.
“With this ring, I take you as my husband.” That heavy gold band sat there on his left hand, unfamiliar, and altering in a way he hadn’t imagined it could be.
That was a married man’s hand.
They were married.
They could be the damned Cleavers if they wanted to. She had grown up without a mother. But their kids would have one. He had grown up without either parent, functionally. One gone, one a danger.
But their kids would have him.
They would have each other.
She wouldn’t have to be lonely, like the way she’d said her dad was.
And he wouldn’t have to be afraid.
He shoved that thought aside. He wasn’t afraid. He was a grown-ass man who had survived death for the first time at age six. He wasn’t afraid.
But life, and the path forward seemed a little bit clearer now. A little bit brighter.
There was that.
