Your Love Came Late, I Chose Another novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Again

I didn't say yes right away.

I knelt down in the dirt in front of him, so we were the same height.

"Ask me again," I said. "Slower."

His mouth twitched.

"You're making me work for it."

"You made me say everything plainly. Twice."

He took my left hand.

He held his grandmother's ring at the tip of my finger, not pushing it on.

"Noelle," he said. "Will you marry me. On purpose this time."

"Yes," I said. "On purpose."

The ring went on.

It fit.

He kissed me there in the cold orchard, both of us on our knees in the mud, until a farm dog came barking down the row to see who we were.

We set the date for April eighteenth.

A year to the day.

"You're sure?" Bree asked. "That's a haunted date."

"That's why," I said. "I want it back."

We got married in the orchard on a Saturday at twelve-thirty.

The peach trees had finished blooming the week before.

Pink petals lay all over the grass between the rows, and little green fruit no bigger than a thumbnail had set on every branch.

There were no white chairs.

People sat on hay bales and quilts and the tailgates of trucks.

My grandmother's church ladies from Summerville came in a van, in hats, with four casseroles.

Two of my cousins drove down from Columbia.

The whole staff of Ashe House came, the housekeeper in a purple dress with a feather duster sticking out of her purse "for luck."

The old man with the cane sat in the front, on the best hay bale, in a seersucker suit.

The woman in the sun visor came with her husband and the daughter from Atlanta.

Bree was my maid of honor again, in a sage dress she said she'd only wear once more in her life.

Tara stood at the very back, by the farm stand, in a plain blue dress.

She'd baked the biscuits for the reception herself, three hundred of them.

They were tall.

The officiant was the same old man with the white beard.

He'd called the bakery in February and asked for the job.

"I want to see how it ends," he'd said.

I didn't walk down an aisle.

I walked down a row of peach trees, barefoot in the petals, in a white cotton dress to my knees with tiny buttons down the back.

Nobody carried me.

Nobody gave me away.

When the officiant got to that part, Bree said loudly, "She does," and the church ladies laughed so hard one of them dropped her fan.

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