The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 164

Chapter 150: The Wedding Day

Bella pov

Claim

Maya met my eyes in the mirror. I pointed at her, she pressed her lips together and went back to my hair without a word.

By the time Maya zipped my dress it was eleven-fifteen and the house had settled into a quieter kind of energy – the guests had gone ahead, Priya and Adaeze had left with hugs and lipstick and genuine warmth, and it was just Maya and Diana and Tom and me in the upstairs bedroom.

Maya stepped back when she was done and I turned to the mirror.

She pressed her lips together in exactly the way she’d promised she wouldn’t.

“You said no face,” I said.

“I’m not doing a face.”

“Maya.”

“I’m not,” she said, her voice perfectly level and her eyes doing something else entirely. “You just look like you. That’s all, the right version of you.” She reached out and straightened something at my shoulder that didn’t need straightening. “He’s going to fall apart.”

“He doesn’t fall apart,” I said.

“He cried at Tom’s school play,” Diana said, from the corner, without looking up from her phone.

I looked at her. “He did not.”

“He did. He turned away and pretended to cough but I was standing next to him.” She looked up. “He’s going to fall apart.”

Maya pointed at Diana with the vindicated energy of someone who had just received expert corroboration. “See.”

Tom appeared in the doorway in his small suit, the ring pillow held in both hands, walking at the exact measured pace of someone who had been told slow and had taken it as the most important instruction of

their life.

“I’m practising,” he said, without looking up.

“You’re doing perfectly,” I said.

He made it to the centre of the room, stopped, and looked up at me. Something moved across his face surprise first, then something that went quiet and soft underneath it. He opened his mouth and closed it again, which almost never happened with Tom.

“Well?” Maya said, gently.

“You look like a princess,” he said finally. Then, reconsidering, with the seriousness of someone making a precise distinction: “Not a pink princess. A real one.”

13

Chapte SD e Wedding Day

Clam

I-did not cry but I came very close but held it by breathing through my nose for four seconds and looking at the ceiling, which Diana had the decency to pretend not to notice.

“Right,” Maya said, briskly, because she understood that if anyone said anything else of substance in the next thirty secondsTwas going to ruin my makeup. “Shoes. Tom, pillow. Diana, car. Let’s go.”

The garden was small, which had been the whole point. Caleb had offered the rooftop so it could be spectacular, two hundred people, the full architecture of wealth on display and I had said I want the garden at the house and he had said our house without making a point of it, just naturally, and that had been the end of it.

Forty people. White flowers along the fence, simple wooden arch, chairs in two short rows with the people who had actually shown up.

I stood at the garden gate with Maya beside me and felt the morning air and thought about the first wedding. The photographers, the ballroom, the dress they had chosen because it was what a billionaire’s bride was supposed to wear. The ceremony that had been a transaction dressed in flowers and the night that had followed.

This was nothing like that.

“Ready?” Maya said.

“Yes,” I said, and meant it completely.

I walked myself down the aisle. I had known I would from the beginning. There was no one I wanted that could walk me down and the people who should have played that role had forfeited it a long time ago. I walked at my own pace through the gap between the rows – Maya, Diana, Lena, Ethan, James, Priya, the people who had earned their seats and kept my eyes on the wooden arch and the man standing under it.

Caleb saw me. He didn’t move. He just looked, and his jaw tightened the way it did when he was holding something in. His eyes went bright as he looked at the ground for just a moment, pressing his lips together, and then looked back up at me and kept looking, all the way until I reached him.

“Hi,” I said, quietly.

“Hi,” he said, and his voice wasn’t steady and he didn’t pretend otherwise.

From behind us came a small sound of effort as Tom, who had paused at the midway point to re-grip the ring pillow with both hands, completed his approach at the exact measured pace he had been practising for weeks and positioned himself between us with the satisfaction of someone who had executed a plan.

The guests laughed, soft and warm as Tom looked up at both of us and beamed with his gap-toothed grin.

“Good job,” Caleb said quietly.

“I know,” Tom said.

The officiant was unhurried and kind and said the words that needed to be said, and then we said ours. We’d written them together at the kitchen table weeks ago.

“I promise,” Caleb said, holding both my hands, his grey eyes steady and unguarded on mine, “to keep

23

Chapter 150-The Wedding Day

Clam

choosing you. Not because I have to, but because there is no version of any life I want that doesn’t have you in it. Every day, without condition.”

I held his gaze and felt the truth of his words.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify