Chapter 6
I want to be careful about how I describe what happened next, because it would be easy to make it sound like a fairy tale resolved itself instantly, and that isn't accurate either. We spent the better part of a year being honest with each other in a way neither of us had been forced to practice before — two people who had been thrown together by other people's transactions, working out, slowly and without performance, whether there was anything real underneath the circumstances that had brought us together. There was. Not instantly, not without complicated conversations about debt and obligation and what either of us actually wanted versus what we'd been handed. But it was there.
We renewed our vows eighteen months later, in a small private ceremony on the grounds overlooking the Hudson, with no stained glass and no audience performing happiness on our behalf. My father attended. Vivian gave a short, dry toast that made Ethan laugh harder than I'd heard him laugh in the year since the boardroom. Dr. Ellison was there, restored to Ethan's care permanently. Jason was not invited, and was, by that point, awaiting trial.
I sat beside Ethan that evening, his hand resting easily in mine — no longer trembling with the effort of a single curled finger, no longer hidden under a veil from a cousin's suspicious eyes — and I thought about the first night I had sat in that sunlit room, certain I was talking to no one, confessing the truth of my life to a man I believed could not hear a word of it.
May you like
He had heard every word.
He told me, much later, that it was the reason he fought as hard as he did to come back.
