His Love Was My Poison novel · Chapter 23 of 48

Chapter 23: The Light

Posy had been right about one thing.

We were never going to pick a date.

She picked it, and on October eleventh, a hundred and twelve people came.

The warehouse didn't look like a warehouse.

Our engineers had spent three weekends on it.

The benches were pushed against the brick walls and covered with white paper and jars of yellow mums.

Strings of lights ran from the iron staircase to the rafters and back down again, hundreds of them.

On every table sat a little lamp the hardware team had built from spare kit housings.

Each one glowed a soft, steady green.

"No candles," Posy had announced at the planning meeting, with her clipboard. "Not one. Not even on the cake. I'm checking."

She had checked.

Twice.

My mother came in from Akron on the bus with a garment bag and the potato salad.

She took one look at Micah in the doorway, all six foot four of him in a navy suit with the sleeves already shoved up, and turned to me.

"Well," she said. "He's big."

"He is."

"He'll do," she said, and then she cried for twenty minutes and ruined her mascara.

I wore a plain ivory dress with long sleeves and no beading.

My hair was still cut at the jaw.

Posy pinned a single bobby pin behind my ear, a plain brown one, and stepped back to look.

"For luck," she said. "And for the board."

My old professor gave me away, because my mother said she'd trip on the stairs.

He walked me down the aisle between the lab benches like it was the most serious experiment of his career.

At the end of it, he put my hand into Micah's.

"She's unreasonable," he told Micah. "Don't fix it."

"Wouldn't dream of it, sir."

The judge who married us had been our first customer, before she was a judge.

She'd bought three kits for her county's wells out of her own budget.

She stood in front of the centrifuge in her robe and smiled at us.

"I've been told," she said, "that the groom has prepared vows, and that they contain a pun. I want everyone to know I advised against this."

Micah unfolded a piece of paper.

His hands were shaking.

"Len," he said. "I've known you for six years. I've loved you for four of them. I've been terrified of you for all six."

The room laughed.

"You fix things with whatever's in your hair. You find what's hiding in the water. You walked into the worst week of your life and came out the other side with a contract and a thumbprint." He swallowed. "I promise I'll never ask you to light anything for me. I'll never lie to you about where I am. I'll test the coffee. And I promise that for the rest of our lives, I will be the one who shows up."

He looked up.

"There was going to be a pun. I'm too emotional for the pun."

"Thank God," said the judge.

Then it was my turn.

I didn't have paper.

"Micah," I said. "For eight years I let someone else decide what was good for me. I believed every word he said, and I breathed what he gave me, and I called it love."

The room went very quiet.

"You never told me what was good for me. You just stood next to me while I figured it out. At three in the morning, in a trailer, in a motel with a duck."

A few people laughed through their tears.

"I'm not choosing you because I'm safe with you. I'm choosing you because I can see everything, and I still want it. All of it. Every day."

Micah was crying openly.

Posy, standing beside us as maid of honor and best man at once, handed him a tissue from her sleeve without looking.

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