Damien’s POV
She told she wanted to move the wedding up while wearing a hospital gown and holding a paper cup of bad coffee, with complete calm, as though she were rescheduling a board eting rather than the most significant day of our lives.
This, I had co to understand, was simply how Aria Monroe operated. Decisions made clean and direct, delivered without ceremony, non-negotiable in the specific way that things are non-negotiable when the person saying them has already fully thought it through and is informing you rather than consulting you.
Six weeks, she’d said.
Six weeks.
I’d said yes before I’d fully processed it, which also, I’d co to understand, was simply how things went when Aria Monroe had decided sothing.
I sat in the chair beside her bed after Olivia had taken Noah ho for the second evening — both of them extracted with slightly less drama than the first night, Noah now apparently satisfied that I was reliably present and could be trusted to stay — and I looked at my fiancée sleeping, and I thought about six weeks.
I thought about the plan I’d had — the one that had existed in careful detail in my head for the past month, evolving through the lockdown, refined during the days of the trap preparation, carrying it forward through the barricade and the restaurant and the hours in this chair.
The ring had been in my jacket for weeks. I’d carried it through every version of chaos the last month had produced. I had been waiting, with more patience than I’d ever applied to anything in my life, for the right mont.
She had woken up from surgery and told she wanted to move the wedding up.
I reached into my jacket, hanging over the back of the chair, and took the box out.
Not the ring she was already wearing — This was sothing else. Sothing I’d had made separately, quietly, over the past weeks — a wedding band to sit alongside it, designed to match, the kind of thing you give soone on the day itself as the final piece of a promise already made.
I hadn’t told her about it.
I’d been saving it.
I turned it in my fingers in the low hospital light and thought about what I’d planned — the rooftop, the dinner, the speech I’d been composing and discarding and recomposing for a month — and felt no particular grief that it hadn’t happened that way. If there was one thing Aria Monroe had taught , impatiently and thoroughly, it was that the perfect mont was a fiction invented by people who were afraid of imperfect ones.
She had proposed moving our wedding up from a hospital bed. The mont had always been going to be exactly like this.
I put the box back in my jacket pocket. I’d give it to her on the day. That was what it was for.
She woke at so point after midnight, disoriented for a mont the way you are after deep dicated sleep, and found still in the chair. "You’re still here," she said, voice rough with sleep.
"Still here," I confird.
She looked at with the slightly unfocused clarity of soone operating on the edge of full consciousness. "You should sleep."
"I’m fine."
"Damien." She fixed with the look — the one that had been dismantling my defenses for the better part of a year. "You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"I an it affectionately," she said. "You look like a man who has been sitting in a hospital chair for days because he refused to go ho."
"That is an accurate description of my situation, yes."
She was quiet for a mont, watching with that direct attention that had always seen more of than I was comfortable with.
"Damien," she said.
"Yeah."
"You’ve been waiting for sothing." She shifted carefully, getting comfortable. "Since before any of this. What was it?"
I looked at her. "How do you know that?"
The corner of her mouth moved. "Because I know you. You’ve had this look for weeks — like you were holding sothing back. Like you were waiting for the right mont and the mont kept not arriving."
I stared at her for a second, even years apart and she could still read like that. I wasn’t sure whether to be unsettled or undone by it.
"Rooftop," I said finally. "It was supposed to be private, the evening after Barnes confird the operation was complete. I’d been waiting for the end of all of this so there’d be nothing hanging over it — no threat, no lockdown, just an ordinary evening." I paused. "Dinner. Sothing I’d arranged properly. A speech I’d been writing for a month that I kept discarding because nothing I wrote felt like enough."
She was very still.
"I had sothing made," I continued. "To go with the ring you’re already wearing. I wasn’t going to give it to you that night — I was saving it for the day itself. But the dinner was supposed to be —" I stopped. Tried again. "I wanted one evening that was just ours. No crisis, no Marcus, no logistics. Just us, on a rooftop, and telling you things I should have said years ago."
The room was quiet.
"What things?" she asked softly.
I looked at her — in the hospital gown, with the IV in her arm and the bandage on her shoulder and her hair loose around her face — and felt the speech I’d been composing for a month simply resolve itself into sothing much shorter and much truer.
"That I have never deserved you," I said. "Not once, not for a single day of the ti I’ve known you. And that I have spent the last year trying to beco soone who might eventually be worth what you chose to give ." I held her gaze. "Watching you rebuild yourself from what I did to you, watching you beco who you are now — it is the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed. And I am grateful, every day, that you ca back. That you let try."
She didn’t say anything for a mont. "That," she said finally. "That was the speech?"
"A version of it. The full version was considerably longer and I’ve been editing it for weeks."
The corner of her mouth moved. "I would have liked the full version."
"I’ll tell you on the day," I said. "You can have it in person, in front of everyone, with the ring that goes with yours."
She looked at carefully. "You had sothing made?"
"A band. To sit alongside the sapphire." I held her gaze. "I wanted there to be sothing from the wedding itself. Sothing new, from that day specifically."
She was quiet for a long mont. "Six weeks," she said.
"Six weeks," I agreed. "I’ll manage a rooftop in six weeks."
"I don’t need a rooftop," she said.
"I know you don’t." I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. "But I want to give you one, you spent years building sothing extraordinary with nothing. Let give you the rooftop."
She looked at with the expression I had co to understand as her version of completely undone — not tears, not grand declarations, just that particular quality of stillness that ant sothing had reached past all the armor she’d spent years constructing. "Okay," she said quietly. "Rooftop."
"Rooftop," I confird.
"With Noah as ring bearer."
"Obviously with Noah as ring bearer. He’s been practicing carrying things slowly, apparently."
She smiled — real, unguarded, the one I’d morized. "He ntioned that."
"He ntioned it to approximately four tis today." I sat back. "He’s ready. Professionally prepared. I believe he’s treating it with the seriousness of a small military operation."
She laughed, and it pulled at her shoulder and she winced, and I was imdiately out of the chair, and she waved back with her good hand, still laughing quietly.
"I’m fine," she said. "I’m fine." She looked at from across the small space between us — the room quiet, the city sowhere far below, the night outside the blinds pale and still. "Damien."
"Yeah."
"Six weeks is going to be enough," she said. "I don’t need perfect. I just need sothing real."
"Real," I said. "I can do real."
"You’ve been doing real for months," she said simply. "You’re better at it than you think."
I sat back down. Reached for her hand. She let take it, and we stayed like that in the quiet for a long ti .
In the morning, Noah arrived with Olivia and the almond pastries and his bandaged stegosaurus, and he climbed carefully onto the bed and looked between us both with the assessing gravity of a four-year-old who has been tracking a situation closely.
"Is it still six weeks?" he asked.
"Still six weeks," Aria confird.
He nodded, satisfied. "I need to practice more," he said. "I’m going to ask Mrs. Dora if Theo can co over again."
"That seems wise," I said.
"I know." He settled against Aria’s good side, already moving on to the dinosaur. "I’m very responsible about the ring bearer’s job."
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