Epilogue
394 Words
A year later, they got married again.
This was Cara’s idea, because the first one— she maintained, and Julian did not disagree— had involved a certain amount of grand larceny and emotional fraud and deserved a redo. He had said, in the understated way of a man who had an entire vocabulary in understatement: “If that’s what you want.”
What she wanted was small. Twenty people in the garden of the Mayfair house, strung with lights that Julian had not chosen and could not explain any fondness for and yet had personally supervised the hanging of the previous afternoon.
Isabel came. They had navigated that particular territory over the course of a year— stiffly, then more easily, until Isabel had stayed a week in London and she and Julian had ended up arguing about modern architecture and Cara had watched from the doorway knowing they were going to be fine.
Her father was there,looking older and easier than she’d seen him in years, the company stable, the merger solid.
Julian stood at the end of the garden in the evening light and watched her walk toward him— no cathedral, no veil, no white dress but a deep gold one that she’d chosen herself— and his expression was the one he’d had in the photograph. The one she’d been told about before she saw it herself.
Like a man who had found somewhere to be.
She reached him. She took his hands.
“Second time,” she said, quietly, just for him.
“First one counts,”he said. His grip was warm and certain.
“You would say that.”
“It was legal, technically.”
“Technically.” She smiled. “Say it.”
He looked at her. The garden, the lights, twenty people who loved them, the city beyond the wall going on about its business.
“I love you, Cara Mendez Blackwood,” he said. “Unconditionally, without contract , and apparently for the rest of my life.”
She leaned up and kissed him before the officiant could finish the sentence.
Someone clapped, Isabel, probably.
He kissed her back. His hand pressed warm and sure against the small of her back and she thought, not for the first time: this is what she walked into the wrong room and found.
Everything.
The End
- Writer
