Chapter 13
“I know.”
“You’re not going to ask how long?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you said you need to think.”
I took eleven days.
On the eleventh evening, I found Marcus helping his teenage son, Jonah, build a model rocket on his apartment kitchen table.
Glue covered the newspaper.
Wooden fins were scattered everywhere.
I stood in the doorway.
“Yes.”
Marcus looked up.
“To pizza?” Jonah asked.
“To marriage.”
Jonah pulled off his safety glasses.
“Oh. You should probably kneel, Dad.”
Marcus stood so fast he knocked over a cup of wooden pieces.
He didn’t kneel.
He crossed the kitchen and took my face in both hands.
“Are you sure?”
That question mattered more to me than the ring.
“Yes.”
We married the following October in a courtyard in Boston.
My father walked beside me halfway down the aisle.
Then stopped where we had agreed.
I walked the rest alone.
Not because I had nobody.
Because I finally understood the difference between being accompanied and being carried.
June found one of the rings after Jonah dropped it beneath a chair.
My father complained that the cake had too much frosting and then ate two slices.
Marcus stepped on the hem of my dress during our first dance.
Nothing went perfectly.
Nothing needed to.
There were no reporters.
No corporate directors.
No documents hidden inside gift boxes.
At one point during dinner, I looked around the room and realized I had not thought about Nathan for hours.
That surprised me more than anything.
For so long, I had imagined healing as a dramatic moment.
A door slamming.
A courtroom victory.
A new man proving the old one had been wrong.
It wasn’t.
Healing was quieter.
It was realizing I no longer needed Nathan to regret losing me.
I no longer needed Laya to envy me.
I no longer needed Eleanor to call me family.
I didn’t even need the nine years to mean something different.
They had happened.
I had loved him.
He had loved me, in the flawed way he knew how.
Then he betrayed me.
I had made mistakes too.
And eventually, the story stopped demanding a winner.
The following spring, Vale Biomedical treated the first patient with the therapy Nathan once tried to sell.
I watched from behind the observation window with the research team.
The woman receiving it knew nothing about the wedding.
Nothing about Miles.
Nothing about the trust.