“I can end it. Right now. Before you’re stuck with it for thirty years.”
“By humiliating me at our own wedding?”
His face crumpled. “I’m trying to save you.”
“From what? From loving you?”
“From waking up in ten years and realizing pity turned into your whole life.”
I knelt down in front of him on the dressing room floor, still in my wedding dress, and took the folded pact out of his hands.
“There’s something I never told you,” I said.
He went completely still.
“I knew I loved you before I ever walked across that therapy room. I knew it the night I fell in my bathroom, half-dressed and furious and humiliated. You didn’t rush in and rescue me. You sat down on that cold tile floor next to me and waited until I decided what kind of help I actually wanted.”
His eyes filled.
“Derek saw my body change and decided my whole life had gotten too inconvenient for him. You saw me at my absolute worst, and you never once made me feel small for it.” I put my hand against his cheek. “You didn’t carry me until I could walk again, Eli. You stood next to me until I remembered who I still was.”
He looked down at his hands. “I still don’t want your gratitude.”
“Good. Because gratitude isn’t why I get jealous when women flirt with you at the grocery store.” A laugh cracked through his tears. “Gratitude isn’t why I know exactly how you take your coffee, or why I can’t sleep right when you’re not next to me, or why I want to be the one arguing with you when we’re eighty years old.”
I stood and held my hand out to him.
Then I led him straight into the ceremony room, ahead of schedule, before a single guest had even taken their seat.
My mother’s face went pale the second she saw us walk in together.
I turned to face the whole room.
