Nine: Wedding Bells!!!

The quiet after Erin’s vow did not break. It sat over the ring of water and the long curve of chairs along its edge and simply went on, the kind of quiet that makes a person aware of the sound of her own swallowing, and nobody out here was going to be the one to end it.

Norah had been sitting perfectly still for most of an hour, which was not a thing she was built for. She shifted to recross her legs. The heel of her left shoe found the lip of the seat on the way over, caught there, and pitched her sideways with no warning at all, straight into Marissa’s shoulder.

She stayed there a second longer than dignity allowed. Then she pushed herself upright. Nothing hurt. Nothing ever did. The grass under the chairs had been trying to take her ankles all afternoon, and she was not going to give it the satisfaction of a sound.

“This chair,” Norah muttered, “has been waiting all day for that.”

Marissa laughed, low, barely more than a breath, the way she did everything now. “It’s a very patient chair.”

“It’s a vindictive chair.”

“You kicked it first.”

Norah smoothed the skirt of her dress, which did not need smoothing, and looked back out across the water.

The mound sat in the middle of the ring like a stage built for a much smaller play. Seven lamps burned in a row on the dais. Andy stood under the arbor with the seven brides beside him in the order they had crossed, four of them wet-faced and finished, three still waiting. From here they were all bright shapes: Myra’s tails, Claire’s ears, Emi’s six arms folded in close, Laura at the far end three times over. Every one of them stood as if the ground under her feet had only just been laid.

Of everything that had come across the water in the last half hour, it was Emily’s line that was still hanging in the air. Emily at the start of her vow, reminding Andy loud enough for every chair to hear that she was the one who had asked him. The rows had laughed at that, fond and helpless. Norah had laughed too.

Marissa had not. Norah noticed it now, the way she noticed a column that wouldn’t total—after the fact, and then all at once. Marissa had her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the line of brides. Her face was calm. It was always calm. But she was sitting forward a little, the way a person sits on the edge of a pool deciding about the water.

“Emily asked me this morning,” Marissa said, without turning her head. “While we were getting dressed. Whether I still want to be a bride.”

Norah waited. It sounded like a sentence with more behind it.

“And I told my sister, after. Sarah. I told her it isn’t a maybe.” Her voice was the usual near-whisper, pitched for one person, and it reached Norah and went no farther. “She teased me. Mercilessly. But the truth is… I want that. I want to stand up on that mound one day and make Andy a vow of my own.” A pause, not a long one. “I don’t know when. But I want it.”

She didn’t add anything to it. No joke, no anyway, none of the soft reasonable backpedal Norah had heard her put on a hundred smaller things. She let it sit there between their two chairs with her eyes still on the brides, as if she had set down something heavy and was only now finding out she could stand up straight without it.

Norah turned in her chair to look at her properly. She had known Marissa since the first week, or thought she had. She knew about the sister and the piano, and the therapist Marissa kept catching herself being halfway through a sentence. She had not known this. And Marissa had just handed it to her, in a folding chair at somebody else’s wedding, with no warning at all.

Norah found that her own throat had gone tight, which was absurd. It wasn’t even her want. “I didn’t know that,” she said.

“Not many people do.” The corner of Marissa’s mouth moved. “I’m working on it.”

“You just told me.”

“I did.”

Norah considered that. Then, because it was the only honest thing she had to hand, she gave one back. “I never wanted that part,” she said. “The standing up there. Everyone watching you mean it.” She lifted one shoulder. “Not for me. It was never the part I wanted.”

“I know.” Marissa glanced at her, and there was something warm and amused in it. “You told all of us. When they asked what we wanted after the show.”

“A real boardroom,” Norah said. “And gelato.”

Marissa laughed properly this time, one hand rising to her mouth. “I remember. You said it like it was a business plan.”

“It is a business plan.”

“Then I want in. I’d order the strangest flavor they make.” Her eyes had gone bright. “Whatever nobody else will touch. I always do. If it’s got an umlaut in it, I’m in.”

“Nobody puts an umlaut on gelato.” Norah laughed with her. It came out easier than she expected—not the laugh she kept for rooms full of colleagues, but the other one, the one from before she had learned to keep anything. And the boardroom and the gelato were true, every word.

Her eyes went back across the water.

Liesa stood on the mound in her place as maid of honor, a little in front of Arabella, and even standing still she was moving, caught in the slow, rolling sway she had never once been able to switch off, hips and shoulders going on with it as though there were music out there that only she could hear. Norah had watched her fight it, once. She didn’t fight it anymore. From here she looked like someone who had made her peace with the weather.

And last night, at the bonfire, Liesa had married Sam. She had called Norah across the fire by name to stand up with her, in front of everyone, and Norah had got up out of the sand in her heels and gone, and stood there, and meant it.

On the mound, Liesa’s head turned. Her eyes went past Andy to Sam at his shoulder, holding the fire brand low, and stayed there.

The read came up in Norah without being asked for. It always did: a small, sure, mostly useless click whenever she watched two people together, like a meter finding its reading. Yes. A strong one. She almost laughed. It told her nothing she hadn’t watched Herman pronounce by firelight last night.

And while she was still watching it fire, it happened again.

It had never once landed on her. All these months of it going off across breakfast tables and down hallways, and it had always been other people, two chairs, two names, never hers. Now it swung in the same unbidden way and found her, and found Andy standing under the arbor with seven women at his side, and came back.

Yes.

Not the click she knew. Something lower, and wider, and so certain that for a moment she couldn’t get her breath all the way down.

She believed it. She had never trusted the thing about anyone else. It misfired, it was wrong half the time, just yesterday it had told her Mildred and Mark Garret would have great sexual chemistry, and she had long ago stopped acting on it. She believed this one completely, the way you believe the floor.

She had spent months keeping the two of them under review, the way she kept everything under review, waiting for the column that would not total. It had always totalled. She had just never trusted the arithmetic enough to stop checking it.

Andy was the one she never had to ask about. Whether she would ever tell him what the read had said, she didn’t know. Probably not. Some things were better kept where you could take them out and look at them. She kept all of it. Every piece, behind her face, where it went.

Beside her, Marissa hadn’t moved. Her eyes were on Andy and the line of brides, and her lips were very slightly parted, as if she were already trying out something under her breath that she didn’t mean for anyone to hear for a long time yet.

Norah’s eyes went from Liesa to Sam.

Sam held the brand down at Andy’s side, and the flame stood straight up off it, steady as a candle in a shut room. Sam wasn’t watching the crowd. She was looking along the line of brides, down to its far end, where Laura stood in all three of her bodies, waiting her turn.

She reached down and pressed the back of each shoe firmly onto her heel, one and then the other. Then she drew both feet in under the chair and set them, her weight forward on the balls of them. It was not a comfortable way to sit. She had no intention of being comfortable.

On the mound, Arabella turned toward the far end of the line, where Claire and Emi and Laura’s three bodies were still waiting.

“Here we go,” Marissa murmured.

“Here we go,” Norah said. Their shoulders touched. Neither of them moved away. Across the water, Arabella lifted her head and called Claire forward.

---

The seven flames on the dais stood out brighter than they had a minute ago. Clouds had come in from the west while nobody was watching the sky, a long soft bank of them sliding over the Inner Gardens, and the light had gone down a shade, the way a room does when somebody draws a curtain across one of its windows. It was only weather. The lamps did not mind it. If anything, they looked more like themselves.

Sam still held the brand low at Andy’s side. Beyond her, Harper waited near the dais with the seven rings in her keeping, both hands cupped carefully around the box, as if they might otherwise try to leave.

Claire had heard her name.

She shifted her bouquet into the crook of one arm and drew a folded page out of the ribbon wound around the stems. She must have tucked it there before she ever set foot on the fifth bridge, Andy realized, and carried it all the way across without giving a sign. Then she came and stood in front of him with both ears turned toward him and held there.

Through the bond, her nerves came at him pulled tight as wire. She unfolded the page and held it up in both hands so that only he could see the top of it, where a single line sat above everything else in her small, careful hand:

Andy—please read this aloud for me. I cannot, and I want them to hear it.

He looked from the page to her face.

“You’re sure?” he said, low enough that it went no farther than the two of them. “Every word?”

Claire nodded, once. Then she put the page into his hands.

It was written out in numbered points. He knew that form. It was the form of the letter she had once written to ask him to marry her—the numbers, the careful parentheses, not a single contraction anywhere—and he had read that letter so many times since that he could have recited most of it. Near the bottom of this page one line had been crossed out and written again beneath, neater. He cleared his throat.

“‘One,’” Andy read.

The garden went still to listen.

“‘More than once, I have carried hard news alone for days before I could bring myself to give it to you. I told myself I was sparing you. I promise that from today, whatever I learn that you need to know, I will bring to you on the same day. All of it.’”

He stopped.

He had not meant to. It was the all of it that did it, or what was under it: the last time, two days of her carrying something through the halls with her ears flat and her notebook closed, sitting across tables from him with the kind of silence that has a shape you can walk into in the dark. He remembered her face when she finally set it down in front of him. It had not looked like relief. It had looked like an apology.

Through the bond, Claire held steady. She did not shrink from it, and she did not look away from him. What came across was not worry, but something firm and level, the way a hand laid flat on your back is level, and after a moment he could go on.

“‘Two. I have begun to write down everything that has happened to all of us here. I promise to keep writing. I will write our life down, every day of it, so that nothing that happens to any of us is ever lost.’”

He looked up from the page.

“Start with today,” he said quietly. “Put in that Myra, Emily and Dawn cried.”

Claire’s tail flicked once, hard, which he knew for a laugh. Down the line, Erin made a small sound through her nose. Andy looked back down, found the next number, and for a second did not trust himself with it.

He could take in the whole of it at a glance, and he could see what it was going to make him do: stand here and say I love you in her first person, to himself, in front of the whole garden, with her a foot away and unable to say it for herself. He had heard her say those words aloud exactly once, on the one day in all this time that she’d had a voice to say them with. She had used his whole name. He had not expected to hear them in any voice but his own again, and certainly not like this, with his own mouth doing the work for her.

Claire watched him read it. Her ears did not move at all.

“‘Three,’” he read. “‘I love you. I was the one who asked you to marry me first, and I would ask you again. I told you once that I have never been afraid of you. I am telling you again today, in front of everyone who matters to either of us, because it is still true: I have never once been afraid of you, and I have always trusted you.’”

His voice held until the last line. Then it went, and he let it go.

Out past the water, Annabelle Freeman sat in her chair at the edge of the ring with both hands folded in her lap, exactly where she had put them after she walked back from the fifth bridge. She was watching a man stand in front of her daughter and say her daughter’s own words aloud to the whole garden, slowly, without changing one of them, as if they were something that could break and did not deserve to. She was watching Claire stand in a line between Erin and Emi with the rest of them at her shoulders, a whole row of women who had crossed the same water to the same place.

For most of Claire’s life, Annabelle had been afraid of one thing, and it had never been that Claire would be unhappy. It had been that she would end up alone—that one day there would be nobody left in the room who knew how to hear her. Liesa had already answered that once today, out loud, and Annabelle had believed her. Believing a thing and watching it happen were not the same.

Her eyes filled. Her hands stayed folded, and did not move.

Andy lowered the page. “You asked first,” he said. His voice had gone rough, and he did not try to fix it. “I’ve never forgotten it. I’m never going to let you forget it either. And you never had one reason to be afraid of me, and you’re never going to get one.” He had to stop. “I love you.”

Out in the rows, the breath went out of the whole garden at once, soft, like wind going over a field. Nobody clapped. It was not that kind of quiet.

Claire lifted her hand and laid it over his, over the page. She closed his fingers around it, one at a time, until the paper was folded shut inside his fist. Behind her the tip of her tail curled over on itself and stayed curled. What came through the bond then was so quiet and so certain that he had no word for it, and he did not go looking for one.

She was leaving it with him. He understood that without being told, and he could not have said yet what it meant that she had.

Beside the empty place in the line, Emi had pressed one hand flat against her own sternum. Erin was staring very hard at a point somewhere above the arbor.

Claire stepped back into her place between them. Erin’s shoulder found hers and stayed. Andy kept the folded page in his left hand. He did not put it anywhere.

---

Emi was already moving.

She had been holding the hand of Laura’s farthest body with one of her lower hands since before the first vow, and she let it go now—not fast, but the way you let go of a banister once you are sure of the stair—and stepped out of the line before Arabella had so much as turned her head.

Arabella turned it anyway. She looked at Emi, standing out on the grass uncalled, and something at the corner of her mouth moved. She gave a small nod and let her come.

All six of Emi’s arms went still. They drew in close to her body and folded there, the middle pair holding her bouquet against her, the others crossed and quiet, and Andy knew that stillness. It was the way she stood when every part of her was listening. She came to a stop in front of him and put her chin up.

“Can I tell you something?” she said.

Her voice was soft. It was always soft. But once she had started, it did not waver.

“When I was a girl there were three of us,” Emi said. “You, and Laura, and me. And I was the third one.” She said it plainly, without any hurt left on it. “I spent most of my life at the edge of other people’s stories. Yours too. Both of yours. Just outside the frame, where nobody had to look at me. Waiting for somebody to notice there was room to write me in.”

Andy had heard her say it before, here, once—that she had been the third wheel, the side character. He had not been ready for it then, and he found he was not ready now. He could remember a great many things about being thirteen, and almost none of them had Emi in the middle of them. She had been there. He had simply been looking somewhere else.

“And this morning,” Emi said, “the three of us stood in a kitchen and burned the toast.”

A ripple of laughter went through the nearer chairs.

“Andy burned the toast,” said all three of Laura from the end of the line, warm and immediate, as if she had been waiting all day to get that on the record.

“Andy burned the toast,” Emi agreed, without taking her eyes off him. “And we argued about it, and nobody won, and before I left I told you both I loved you.” She drew a breath. “And halfway down the hall I realized I hadn’t been at the edge of anything. I was just in the middle of breakfast. I didn’t even notice when it happened.”

He felt that land somewhere under his ribs and stay.

“So this is mine,” Emi said. “From today, I stand in the middle of this family. I don’t wait to be invited. I don’t stand in the doorway until somebody makes room.” One of her folded hands tightened on the arm beneath it. “And on the days I can’t feel it—there will be some—I’m going to believe I belong here anyway. Without proof. On purpose. I’m going to keep choosing to.”

Out past the water, Kim Hana still had hold of her husband’s hand, the way she had since he sat back down from walking Emi across. Julien sat perfectly upright beside her. Hana was crying again with no sound at all, and from here Andy could see how furious she was with herself about it.

“And whoever ends up at the edge after me,” Emi said, “I’m going to go out and bring them in. Every time. I know exactly where it is.” Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I lived there.”

A pace in front of Arabella, Liesa closed her eyes. She had stood on this mound earlier in the afternoon and told the whole garden about the worst day of her life, and the girl who had come and sat down on the floor beside her without being asked. She did not open them again for a while.

Emi did not look round at her. She did not need to.

Then she turned. Her own place in the line stood empty between Claire and Laura, and Laura stood beside it, all three of her, waiting her turn. Emi took one step back toward her, and one of her top-left hands unfolded from the rest and reached out and took the hand of Laura’s middle body.

Laura’s other two hands closed a little, on nothing.

“And you,” Emi said. “We made each other a promise, the three of us. That we stick together, no matter what.” Her voice went lower, and did not break. “So it’s the same promise. For you. Exactly as much as for him.”

All three of Laura’s faces crumpled and brightened in the same instant, the way a sky does when the sun finds a gap it had no business finding. None of her said anything. None of her could. Her mouths had all gone the same shape, pressed tight at the corners, and every one of her chins was trembling in time.

Andy knew what had happened between the two of them as girls, and what Emi had forgiven her in the Garden, and how long the two of them had gone without saying any of it. He knew what it was costing Laura to stand still in that line with her hand held and nowhere to put what she was feeling except her face.

The air around the two of them had begun, very faintly, to warm.

Andy found he had to look at the grass for a second before he could look at Emi again.

“You were always in the middle of mine,” he said. His voice came out lower than he meant. “I just never said so in time. I’m saying it now.”

Emi’s eyes spilled over. She laughed through it—a small, surprised sound, as if the tears had arrived before she’d finished deciding about them. Then she let go of Laura’s hand and came into him all at once. Four arms went around him, top pair and lower pair, and held on hard; the middle pair kept the bouquet clear, holding it out behind his back so that not one petal was crushed between them. He put his arm around her, and the hand with Claire’s page in it, and held on back.

The air around them turned warmer, and sweeter, the way it did whenever Emi held someone she loved, until it smelled like a garden in the hour after rain. People at the water’s edge would be breathing it in by now without knowing where it came from.

She held on longer than was strictly polite. It was the kind of hug that leaves a crease in a jacket for the rest of the day. Nobody on the mound seemed to mind.

When she let go, she kept one hand on his chest for a second longer and looked up at him, wet-eyed and very serious. “Also,” Emi said, “you’re still not allowed near the toaster.”

Andy laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it. It came out of him cracked down the middle, and all along the line the brides laughed with him, and out past the water the rows laughed too, without quite knowing why.

Emi went back to her place between Claire and Laura. She did not hurry. She did not look back to check that the space was still there for her. She walked into it, turned, and faced front with her flowers held in her middle pair and her chin still up, as if she had been standing there all her life and everyone had always known it.

Arabella turned to the far end of the line.

“Laura,” she said. Only the name, and then, because it was true and everyone on the hill knew it: “The last of the seven.”

All three of Laura stepped out of the line at once.

---

All three of her came across the grass to him in the same stride, the same length of step, the same small lift of the chin, and stopped in a close half-circle in front of him—her body with the bouquet in the middle, the other two to either side, near enough that he could have touched any of her without moving his feet. Three sets of electric-blue eyes looked up at him. Every one of them was already wet.

He had married her once already, on a footbridge with nobody watching but a goddess and the river. He had not been ready for her then either. He was beginning to suspect he never would be, and that this was not a problem anyone intended to fix.

The thin thread that was all the bond carried now told him where she was, which he knew, and how frightened she was. It had been telling him that all day. It was telling him now.

Laura took a breath with three chests.

“So I want everybody to know,” said all three of her, “that I got a third mouth specifically for today. Two was not going to be enough to get through this.”

The laugh went all the way across the mound and out over the water and came back from the chairs, the kind of laugh a crowd gives when it has been waiting all afternoon for permission. Down the line Dawn made a noise like a hiccup. Sam, at his shoulder, snorted into the smoke of the brand.

“You’ve never once run out of words in your life,” Andy said.

“There’s a first time for everything,” said all three of her, and grinned, and he watched the grin go. It did not fade. It went, all at once, from all three faces together.

When she spoke again her voice dropped. All three of her mouths kept moving, the same words, the same breath—but what reached him was not three voices. It was one. One woman, standing very close, trying not to cry.

“For most of my life,” Laura said, “a small life was never on offer. Not for me. A plain one. A happy one. I didn’t think I got one of those.” She swallowed. “I didn’t even know what wanting one would look like. I didn’t have anywhere to put it.”

In the front row, Carol Cooper had both hands pressed over her mouth. Jim had an arm around her shoulders and his eyes shut. They knew. Of the families out past the water, none but the two of them had watched what Laura had come back from with their own eyes, and neither of them could look at her.

“So I’m going to say it,” Laura said. “I’m going to say what I want, out loud, and nobody’s allowed to laugh.” Her breath hitched. “I want to make rice on a Thursday. Too much rice. I want to do the dishes with you and tell you you’re loading the dishwasher wrong. I want flowers—the cheap ones, in the little plastic pots from the hardware store—and I want to forget to water them, and I want you to water them anyway and not say anything.” Her voice was shaking now. “I want Emi making the coffee. I want to be so bored, but with you next to me, Andy. I want all of the small, stupid, boring stuff. Every bit of it.”

Andy could not see very well anymore.

Down the line, Myra’s tails had wrapped themselves around her own legs. Dawn was openly crying into her bouquet. Erin had given up staring at the arbor and was simply staring at Laura, her jaw set so hard it must have ached.

“I was going to make a joke here,” Laura said. “I had one.” All three of her shook her heads, once, together. “No. I’m not doing that.”

Andy had one ready too. He could feel it sitting right behind his teeth, the easy thing, the thing that would let everybody breathe. He let it go.

She drew a breath that went in ragged and came out worse.

“So this is what I’m promising you,” Laura said. “Every ordinary day I’ve got. All of them. And on every single one of them I’m going to choose you.” The single voice cracked straight down the middle and kept going anyway. “On purpose. Because I want to. Every time.”

All three of her swayed on the last word, together, as if the ground had tipped a degree under her, and caught herself, and stood.

He knew exactly what he was hearing.

The night they married, just the two of them, on the footbridge back home, she had told him everything she had loved him through. His face in a birthday cake. A sandwich he had brought her once when she had not eaten all day. Years of it, a whole childhood, told back to him one thing at a time, every piece of it facing backward, toward what they had already survived.

Not one word of this faced backward. Every promise she was making him pointed the other way.

He had tied a ribbon to a tree promising to keep choosing her, and signed it with the only word she would know was his. She was answering it. In front of everyone, in a voice that sounded like one woman, she was answering it.

The thread between them shivered. The fear on it was still there. It had not gone. But for as long as she held his eyes it was so faint that he could barely find it. For a moment, he thought he could feel something more.

Laura’s eyes had filled all the way. She did not wipe them. All three of her held his gaze, and she let that last promise stand in the air between them for one long breath, and then another, and the whole garden stood there with it and did not breathe either.

Andy’s chest hurt. He let it. Then her voices came back. Three of them, together, bright again, the way the sun comes back after a cloud has been sitting on it: a little too bright, as if to make up for the wait.

“Gotcha,” said Laura.

The breath went out of Andy in a laugh that broke halfway through. “Yeah,” he said, when he could. His voice had nothing left in it. “Yeah. You got me.”

In the front row Carol Cooper had started laughing into her hands, and Jim opened his eyes.

Emi laughed out loud from the line, a wet, helpless sound, and wiped at her eyes with two hands at once. Laura stepped in.

All three of her came in from three sides together and closed around him, so that he stood at the center of her, a body at his chest and a body at each shoulder and her arms everywhere. The bouquet was crushed somewhere between them. Nobody cared. He got his free arm around as much of her as he could reach, and the hand with Claire’s page in it, and held on.

Being that close did what it had always done, since they were children. It steadied them both at once. Her breathing slowed against his collar, three times over. His slowed with it. For a long moment the whole world was the size of the space inside her arms, and there was nothing in it to be afraid of.

He did not know how long they stood like that. Long enough that the garden noticed. Longer.

At last Laura let go, all three of her in the same instant, and stepped back, all three in step. Her faces were blotched and shining and absolutely unembarrassed. She went back across the grass to her place at the end of the line and stood beside Emi, and Emi leaned her shoulder into Laura’s nearest body and left it there, and Laura leaned back. She did not look away from Andy once.

Achievement Earned! (Laura Cooper) Not a Ghost!

Arabella let the line settle. Then she turned, not to the next bride, because there was no next bride, but to him.

“Every one of them has spoken,” she said. “Seven of seven.” She held his eyes a moment longer than she needed to. “It is your turn, Andy Cooper.”

He had no page for this one. He stepped back half a pace instead, so that he could see the whole line at once—Myra at the near end with her tails loose behind her, Emily and Dawn and Erin, Claire with her ears turned his way, Emi, and Laura at the far end, all three of her, blotched and shining. Seven women, standing where they had stopped after crossing the water to get to him. Every face wet. Not one of them hiding it.

He opened his mouth, and for a second nothing came.

“I don’t have it written down,” Andy said. “Claire’s got better handwriting anyway.”

A soft laugh went along the line. Claire’s tail flicked. He let the laugh finish, and then he spoke to them the way he talked when it mattered, which was low, and plain, and one short piece at a time.

“Before I came here, I’d sold the company I built. I had more money than I knew what to do with, and an apartment I didn’t like going home to, and nobody left but Sam. Not really. Nobody I let in.”

At his shoulder Sam dropped her eyes to the grass. She was grinning, as if he had finally said out loud something she had been waiting a long time to hear him admit. She did not look up.

“And I’d decided,” Andy said. “Really decided. A wife, kids, a family—that was for other people. It wasn’t for me. I was fine.” He shook his head. “I was telling myself I was fine.”

Out past the water, in the front row, his mother’s hand found his father’s.

“Then I got here, and you found me. All of you.” His voice was steady, for now. “And I tried to keep every one of you at arm’s length, at the very first. I did it on purpose. I thought it’d be safer—for you, for me, I don’t even know anymore. I stood up at my own birthday party and said so out loud, to most of you, like it was something I’d figured out.” He breathed in. “And not one of you let me. Not one.”

Down the line Erin made a small, rude sound, as if to say obviously. Nobody laughed at it. Myra’s ears had turned toward him and stayed.

“Today,” Andy said, and had to stop. He tried again. “Today every one of you crossed that water to get to me. One bridge at a time. I watched you do it.” His voice had begun to go, and he let it. “And I stood up here, and I waited. That was my whole job today. Stand here and wait, and let you come.”

He looked along them, and took his time about it. He had watched every one of them come. He was not going to forget a step of it.

“I’m done waiting,” Andy said. “From now on, I’m the one who crosses. Whenever any one of you needs me, wherever you are, whatever’s going on—I come to you. You don’t have to come get me. I’m already on my way.” His throat closed, and opened. “And I will never again hold any of you at arm’s length to keep you safe. Not ever. Not one of you.”

He stopped there. There was nothing after it. He had nothing clever to put on the end and did not try to find something.

He did not know if it was the best vow anyone had ever made. It was the true one. Whatever it was going to cost him to keep, he would find out as he went, one crossing at a time, and he found he did not especially mind not knowing.

The garden was completely silent. Then, from the far end of the line, all three of Laura’s voices together: “Took you long enough.”

Andy laughed. He could not have stopped it for anything. It came up out of the place the vow had come from and it hurt on the way out, and he stood there laughing with his eyes streaming and Claire’s page crushed in his fist, and did not care who saw.

None of her voices were steady. The laugh that went through the mound after it was not steady either. It was the wet, cracked, helpless laugh of a whole row of people who had been holding their breath for a long time and had just been given permission to stop. Dawn laughed so hard she had to hold her bouquet away from her face. Emily put her forehead against Myra’s shoulder. Emi laughed and cried at once and did not bother choosing.

Andy stepped forward again, to his place before the line, Claire’s page still folded in his hand.

Erin bumped her shoulder against Claire’s.

Claire answered her with a quick sign low at her hip, the private shorthand that only Erin and Marissa and Andy had ever learned to read. Andy caught it from where he stood. It meant, near enough, that he had cried in all four of theirs, and that she was writing it down.

Erin snorted.

Claire did not look at him. The tip of her tail curled over and stayed curled. Andy looked down at the page in his fist, gone soft and creased from being held so hard, and thought of her somewhere quiet later with her pen, putting all of it down in that small careful hand—the burnt toast, the rice, the four vows he had not got through dry, his own, which he could already barely remember a word of. He hoped she would be kind about that part. He suspected she would simply be accurate, which with Claire had always come to the same thing.

The clouds had closed the rest of the way over the gardens while nobody watched, soft and grey and ordinary, and under them the seven small flames on the dais stood out bright and steady in their row. The light had gone gentle. The kind of light a room gets at the end of a long afternoon, when nobody has thought yet to get up and turn on a lamp.

Myra, Emily, Dawn and Erin, Claire and Emi, and Laura in all three of her bodies stood beside Andy in the order they had crossed. Arabella stood at the basin with Nick Reynolds behind her, and Liesa a pace in front, her eyes open again now. Sam kept her place at his shoulder with the brand held low. Harper waited by the dais with the seven rings cupped in her hands, and Laura Black stood near her, and the bridesmaids, Candy and Skye and Katherine, kept their places along the mound’s edge. Out past the ring of water the guests sat on in their long curving rows, and not one of them had moved.

Arabella let the quiet hold.

She let it stand over the seven lamps as long as it wanted, the way a person lets a bell finish ringing before she speaks. Then she lifted her head and turned to the whole gathering.

“Every vow has been spoken,” Arabella said. “The seven brides’, and his.” She turned toward Harper, and the seven rings.