Page 115 of The Florist and Her Alphas

She looks up at me in the mirror, and her eyes have gone bright and wet, and her mouth twists like she’s fighting something.

“Don’t,” she whispers. “Don’t make me cry and ruin my makeup before we even get downstairs.”

She gives the zipper one more pull, careful and sure, and it slides the rest of the way home in one smooth motion, and she lets out a small broken sound of relief that is half laugh, half sob.

She comes to stand beside me at the mirror.

My wedding dress is ivory silk, simple, cut in clean lines that flow softly over the curve of my belly. My hair is half up, the rest falling in loose waves over my shoulders.

“You look stunning,” Mira says.

“We picked a good one,” I tell her, and she wipes her eye with one careful knuckle so as not to smudge her liner.

She crosses to the small writing desk under the window, where my bouquet waits. I personally made my own bouquet of beautiful white wedding hydrangeas and peonies, cut from the garden below an hour ago. She picks it up. Comes back. Presses it into my hands.

“Okay. I’m going to go make sure sixty people are actually sitting down and not still drinking champagne on the lawn. I’ll see you down there,” she says, kissing my cheek, and then she’s gone, the door clicking shut behind her, and I am alone in the bridal suite for the first time all day.

I turn slowly in front of the mirror.

I lay one hand flat against my belly through the silk. Something rolls beneath my palm, small and insistent, and then again, a second smaller flutter answering the first, and some days I still can’t quite believe it, even with the sonogram photos taped inside my kitchen cabinet where I see them every morning.

I walk to the tall window.

The garden spreads out below me, and for a long moment I just stand there and let myself look at it.

Seven months ago my family’s estate was bramble, rot and a stone wall half swallowed by ivy. Now it’s peonies in cream and pale pink along every border, foxglove standing tall as I remember it, white heather lining the stone path like a fall of snow that never melted.

Rows of white wooden chairs are on the lawn with about sixty guests in them. Near the back, I spot Toby, curls escaping his beanie, leaning in to say something to the small woman beside him who must be his mother.

In the mountain ash tree above the bench, Pepper sits on a low branch with a yellow rose tied at his throat on a thin length of green ribbon, preening one wing feather at a time with the focused, self-satisfied attention of a bird who has already decided he is the most important guest here.

He looks up. Finds my window. Finds me.

He fluffs himself to twice his size, and even from here I can see his beak moving, and I don’t need to hear him to know what he’s saying.

Below him, four men move into place at the front of the garden, facing the aisle, and my breath catches.

Ezra in pale charcoal. Julian in cream. Cole in dove gray. August in soft fog. All four in matching shades of a color that isn’t quite a color, with peridot chips glinting at their cufflinks to match the stone on my finger, with a small sprig of mountain ash pinned at the lapel.

They start to glance around, restless, the way men get right before something they’ve waited a long time for, and I step back from the window before any of them can catch me watching.

I pick up my bouquet from the desk. Hold it in both hands. Walk to the bedroom door.

I walk down the stairs alone.

Nobody’s arm under mine. Nobody steadying me at the elbow. I am the last of the Marsh line, and I am the one who decided, weeks ago, that I would walk myself into this.

The string quartet beside the bench lifts into the first slow, aching bars of the wedding march, and the guests rise to their feet in a soft ripple, and at the very front, in cream silk with her bouquet already trembling in her hands, Mira is crying before I’ve even taken my first step.

I rest one hand on my belly, and the bouquet shakes in my other hand. I pass Toby in the back row, and he is sobbing audibly into his mother’s shoulder.

I reach the empty bench in my family’s honor.

I stop.

Slowly, carefully, I lower myself and lay one small peony stem from my bouquet across the sage-green wood, still warm from the sun, and I press my palm flat against it and close my eyes for half a second.

“I’m getting married today,” I whisper, feeling their ghosts nod in approval, smiling down at me. Tears spring to my eyes as I smile and imagine them all sitting on the bench watching me get married.