Chapter 47: Small Wedding

Mara's POV

He asked me on the porch that Monday night, with hay on his shirt and his eyes red.

He held out a ring in his open palm.

It was a thin, old, plain gold band.

It had been under a false bottom in the H-4 box with a comb and a photograph.

The trooper captain had brought it back in a paper evidence bag.

"It was hers," Ronan said. "This is the rest of her."

"Ronan."

"I'm not asking you for blood. I'm not asking for the seat."

His voice shook.

"Will you marry me? In a yard, with a paper from the county. You can say no."

"Yes."

"I haven't finished."

"I'll let you finish at the wedding," I said, and I kissed him on the porch with the porch light on.

We held it on the last Saturday in October, in the yard behind Ridge Hall, under a sky so clear the pines stood sharp against it.

Abel had cooked for three days.

Twelve long tables stood on the grass with paper cloths.

Every Alpha of the Moot sat at one of them in a suit that didn't fit.

The young escort sat at the next table with his mother in her wheelchair and her gray braid tied up in a ribbon.

The north fork's mother had her own chair at the end of the front row.

The old woman from Cedar Lodge sat beside her with a deck of cards in her lap.

The nine from Larkspur House had come in a van the new director drove himself.

They were all in their good clothes, and nobody wore a band.

I stood at the kitchen door in my sock feet.

My dress was cream, and it came from a shop in Brackett.

Over it I wore a gray cardigan with a darned elbow.

It had hung on the back of a kitchen chair at Ridge Hall for nine years.

Ronan had taken it down himself that morning and put it in my hands, and neither of us had said anything.

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