Page 67 of Where Vows Collapse
Elias stepped forward. His hands came up to the sides of her face.
“I love you. You mean everything to me. You are everything to me. Show me what it looks like when you’re not afraid.”
She made a sound. A breath, mostly. Her eyes filled, and she leaned up to kiss him.
She kissed him standing in the foyer of the apartment that had been, for the length of a marriage, the place where he'd failed to see her, and the kissing in the foyer was its own kind of repair — the acknowledgment that the wound existed but they were both going to carry it and that the carrying was going to be done together.
They made love again, this time on the couch in the living room with the lights of Chicago coming in through the wall of glass. They made love with his mouth on her neck, her hands in his hair and the city below them. When she came she said his name and he said hers. The saying of the names was the thing that mattered, because the names had been, for the whole of their marriage, the thing they'd been unable to say to each other without a door between them.
There was no door now.
Afterward, they lay on the couch in the living room with the lights of the city on the ceiling and his arm across her waist and her back against his chest. She was warm, he was warm, and the apartment around them was, for the first time since she'd left it, warm.
"Say it again," Noelle said.
"I love you. I’ll say it every single day for the rest of our lives, if you’ll let me. I love you.”
She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes filling with tears again. “I like the sound of that.”
And then she turned back and settled against his chest, pulled his arm tighter around her waist. They lay on the couch in the living room and watched the city through the glass. The city did what the city did, and they did what they were going to do, which was lie there together in the dark and begin.
EPILOGUE
NOELLE
One Year Later
This time,the wedding dress was hers.
She'd found it at a shop on Division she'd been walking past for months — a narrow storefront between the florist and the place that sold handmade soap, with a single dress in the window on a wooden hanger. The dress was cream. She'd done white, and white belonged to a woman standing at the end of an aisle in a room her father had chosen because it read as restraint. This was cream.
She'd bought it without trying it on. She'd carried it home in a paper bag and hung it in the closet and looked at it for a week before telling Elias she'd found something to wear.
The rooftop was his idea.
They'd sold the penthouse in the spring, quietly, through a broker who hadn't asked why, and the selling had been the first joint decision they'd made since the divorce. The penthouse had been his rooms. The Mathieus' apartment had been hers. They'd found, after weeks of looking, an apartment on a tree-lined street in Lincoln Park — walking distance from the bookshop,close enough to the lake that the light in the mornings was the light she'd come to associate with the beginning of things. The apartment had a rooftop garden. The garden had been neglected by the previous owners: a collection of dead containers, rotting trellises and one stubborn rosemary bush that had survived the winter without anyone asking it to.
She'd rebuilt the garden the way she'd built the bookshop: on her knees, with her hands in the dirt, choosing what to plant without consulting anyone. Elias had carried the bags of soil up four flights of stairs because the building didn't have a freight elevator. He'd done it without commenting on the number of bags or the weight of them, and at the end of the afternoon he'd stood at the edge of the rooftop with soil on his shirt and saidtell me what goes whereand she'd told him and he'd planted where she pointed.
The garden was in full bloom now. The containers were heavy with lavender, rosemary and the trailing nasturtiums she'd started from seed in the kitchen window.
The rooftop was where they were getting married.
The ceremony was at seven, with the long golden light low over the buildings to the west and the lake visible between the rooftops to the east. This one was intimate, fifty people. Their parents. Friends from the bookshop, from Clark Street, from the neighborhood they'd chosen together. Enough people to fill the rooftop without crowding it. Enough to make the evening feel held.
The containers of lavender were giving off the warm herbal scent they gave off in the evenings when the day's heat was leaving the soil, and the nasturtiums were trailing over the edges of their pots in long orange and yellow ribbons. The rooftop looked, she thought standing in the doorway with her mother beside her, like a room someone had built on purpose.
She'd built it on purpose.
Her mother squeezed her arm. "You look — " her mother began.
"Don't say lovely."
"I was going to say like yourself."
Their eyes met, and neither of them said anything else, because the thing that needed saying had been said in a kitchen months ago.
"Ready?" her mother said.
