Aria

The ring inside caught the candlelight.

My hand went over my mouth before I’d decided to move it.

He looked at me. Just looked at me, steady and sure, the way he did everything.

"Aria Thorne," he said. His voice was quiet in the big room. "Will you marry me."

I was already crying.

I nodded before I could find my voice, nodding hard, and then I said yes, out loud, so he would be absolutely certain, and then I was crossing the room and he was standing and I walked directly into his chest and his arms came around me and I kept crying in a way that was completely out of my control.

He put the ring on my finger.

I pulled back just enough to look at it, blurry through my tears, and then looked up at him.

"I thought I was going to die," I said. My voice came out rough and thick. "A week ago I genuinely thought I was going to die and now you’re—"

"You didn’t," he said.

"I know." I laughed, badly, through the tears. "I know, I just—"

He kissed me. Long and slow and careful. His hands cradling my face like I was something worth holding gently.

I stopped trying to find words.

. . .

One year later.

. . .

I was trying to get a photo to stay perfect on the wall and it kept tilting slightly to the left no matter what I did.

‎

‎I stepped back and looked at it. Our wedding photo looked back at me, also slightly tilted. I straightened it again. It tilted again.

‎

The other photo was new. Well not really... But I was new in the sense that I had it reprinted and framed last week because the first one wasn’t to my liking and I was only just now finding the right place for it in-between other pictures of me and Kael on different occasions. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

I held up the new picture against the wall, tilting it slightly, checking the light.

In it, I was looking at the camera. Lyra was in my arms, days old. I was smiling, a smile I couldn’t turn off in those first few weeks no matter how tired I was.

Kael was not looking at the camera.

He was looking at us. At me and at our new born daughter. His profile half turned, and his expression was the one he reserved for things he didn’t have words for. Open in a way his face almost never was in public. Like he’d forgotten for a moment that the camera existed.

I loved that photo more than I knew how to explain.

I hung it on the wall, adjusted it once, and stepped back.

Around it, the others. Our wedding photo, the two of us in the kind of light that makes everything look like it was always going to happen.

A wide shot of the reception where you could see everyone, Olivia mid-laugh, Ash raising a glass, Nikolai standing very straight near the back looking genuinely moved and trying not to show it, and Ewan at the far end of the table, older, thinner, but present.

Actually there. I had looked at that photo more than any of the others in the first few months, finding something different in it each time.

Lyra’s newborn photo. Her face small and scrunched and perfect.

One of just me and Kael on a Tuesday morning in this kitchen that someone had taken candidly when neither of us was paying attention. I didn’t even remember it being taken.

I stood back and looked at all of them together on the wall.

Then from the living room came Ash’s voice, loud and cheerful: "She smiled at me. Olivia, she smiled at me, that was absolutely a real smile."

"She has gas," Olivia said.

"She does not have gas, she smiled because she knows I’m her favorite—"

I turned away from the wall before my face could do anything embarrassing, and walked toward the noise.

Ash had Lyra.

This was, by now, the natural state of things whenever Ash was in the room. She had appointed herself godmother sometime around month seven of my pregnancy, announced it to everyone without asking, and had since taken the role with a seriousness that I found both deeply touching and occasionally exhausting.

Right now she was sitting on the large sofa holding Lyra against her chest with both arms, looking down at her with an expression of pure, helpless adoration.

Olivia was perched on the arm of the sofa, leaning over to look at Lyra as well, making the very soft sounds adults make around babies when they think no one is watching.

Caleb was on the floor nearby with a game of some kind with Lily, completely unbothered after having his usual fill of holding Lyra.

Nikolai was standing near the kitchen doorway with a cup of something, his hair half up the way I’d come to think of as his normal, watching the scene in front of him with the quiet, warm expression he’d started wearing more often in the past year.

He caught my eye when I came in and gave me a small nod.

I looked at all of them.

This was my life.

This specific, real, living thing... these people in this room, this house, this child who had my stubbornness and Kael’s eyes and who had apparently just smiled at Ash.

I started giving instructions about Lyra’s schedule because I was leaving and someone had to, and immediately both Ash and Olivia looked at me with the identical expression of people who have been told something they already know.

"We know," Ash said.

"I’m just—"

"We know, Aria. We have been here. We have done this. Go."

Olivia nodded in firm agreement, which was rich given that twenty minutes ago she hadn’t been sure about tummy time.

I picked up my coat. My bag. Stepped into my heels. Sunglasses on because the afternoon sun was doing something aggressive outside and I refused to squint my way through the day.

Nikolai set down his cup.

We walked out together.