“I knew you were seeing him. And I knew you were hiding him from your father rather than me, so I didn’t take it personally. I never interfered because I liked that you had someone, Lily.” She gestures toward the house behind us. “And now look. You have him forever.”
That story makes me squeeze Emerson a little tighter.
“It makes me happy to know there’s a man in your life that gives meaningful hugs like that,” my mother says.
“He gives more than great hugs,” I deadpan.
My mother scoffs. “Lily!” She stands up, shaking her head. “I’m going home now.”
I’m laughing to myself as she leaves. Then I use my free hand to text Atlas.
I love you so much, you idiot.
Chapter Thirty-Seven Atlas
“Are you seriously about to do this?” Theo asks.
I’m standing in front of a mirror, adjusting my tie. Theo is sitting on the couch, attempting to convince me to let him read my vows before the wedding. “I’m not reading them to you.”
“You’re going to embarrass yourself,” he says.
“I’m not. They’re good.”
“Atlas. Come on. I’m trying to help you. For all I know, you probably end them with something like, It is my wish for you to be my fish.”
I laugh. I don’t know how he still comes up with these lines after two years of this. “Do you practice your insults when you lie awake at night?”
“No, they come naturally.”
Someone knocks on the door and opens it a crack. “Five minutes.”
I give myself one more glance in the mirror before turning to Theo. “Where’s Josh? I need to make sure he’s ready.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you.”
I tilt my head. “Where is he, Theo?”
“Last time I saw him, he was in the gazebo with his tongue down some girl’s throat. He’s gonna make you a grandad soon.”
“I’m his brother. I’d be an uncle, not a grandad.” I look out the window, but the gazebo is empty. “Go find him, please.”
Josh and I are a lot alike, but he’s a little bit more confident with girls than I was at that age. He just turned fifteen, and so far, this is my least-favorite age. I’m sure when he’s old enough to drive next year, it’s going to age me an entire decade.
I need to think about something else. I’m already nervous. Maybe Theo is right, and I should look over my vows again to make sure there’s nothing I want to change or add.
I pull the page out of my pocket and unfold it, and then grab a pen in case I want to make any very last-minute changes.
Dear Lily,
I’m used to writing you letters that no one else will ever read, which may be why I had a difficult time when I first attempted to write these vows. The idea that they were going to be read out loud to you in front of other people was a little bit terrifying.
But vows aren’t meant to be something you make in private. The purpose of a vow is to make an intentional promise that is witnessed, whether it’s witnessed by God, or friends and family.
It has to make you wonder, though, or at least it made me wonder what the purpose is behind the need for a public vow. I couldn’t stop my mind from questioning what must have happened in the past to create the necessity for love to be witnessed.
Does it mean that somewhere along the way, a promise was broken? A heart was shattered?
It’s disappointing if you really sit and think about why vows even exist. If we trusted everyone to keep their word, vows wouldn’t be necessary. People would fall in love, and they’d stay in love, faithfully, forever, the end.
But that’s the issue, I guess. We’re people. We’re human. And humans can sometimes be disappointing.
That realization led me down another path in my thought process while writing these vows. I began to wonder, if humans are so often disappointing and so rarely successful at love, what can we do to ensure ours is a love that will stand the test of time? If half of all marriages end in divorce, that would mean half of every set of vows ever made have ended up broken. How do we ensure we’re not one of the couples who becomes a statistic?
Unfortunately, Lily, we can’t. We can only hope, but we can’t guarantee that the words we stand here and promise one another today won’t end up in the file of a divorce lawyer a few years down the road.
I apologize. I realize these vows are making marriage sound like an extremely depressing cycle that only ends happily half the time.
But for someone like me, that’s actually kind of exciting.
Half the time?
Fifty-fifty?
One out of two?
If someone would have told me when I was a teenager that I would have a fifty-fifty chance of living my entirelife with you, I would have felt like the luckiest human on the planet.
If someone would have told me that I had a 50 percent chance of being loved by you, I would have wondered what the hell I did to get so lucky.
