The One Who Waited novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Again
I didn't say yes right away.
I made him wait a heartbeat.
It was the least I could do.
Then I got down on the flagstones with him, in the green silk, on my knees in the paper napkins.
I put my hands on his face.
"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes. Get up, your knee."
"My knee's fine."
"Your knee's been bad since you were twenty."
"Then help me up."
I helped him up.
He put the ring on my finger above the gold band he'd made, and they fit together like he'd measured.
He had.
On the thirty-first of October, a year to the day, I got married again in a bakery.
Tamara officiated, again, in the same red suit.
"Same couple twice," she said. "I should start charging."
The crew moved the café tables into the garden and set up fifty folding chairs between the moon counter and the front window.
The same fifty chairs. Somebody had stenciled DEAL on the back of every one.
My mother sat in the front row in her church coat.
Luke's mother sat beside her, pacemaker and all, already crying into a bakery napkin this time.
The old head chef came, and the new chief executive of Steady, and the women who made lamps, and the surfboard man.
Luke's old coach drove down from Ithaca and sat in the back with his cane across his knees.
The dog wore the same bow tie.
I wore the same dress.
Ivory silk, plain in front, open all the way down my back.
Nobody told me it wasn't for me.
I walked down the aisle between the chairs on my own again.
When I turned to face him under the DEAL board, the whole room could see my back, and I could see all of them.
Luke wasn't shaking this time.
He looked at me, steady and grinning.
Tamara said, "Dearly beloved. You know the drill."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The One Who Waited are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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