- 2 years later-
Maddy sat in the hotel bathroom with Elle, hours before her wedding.
"You have got to be fucking kidding me, Maddy, seriously?" Elle asked.
Maddy shrugged.
"You do realize that you are 2 for 2 on finding out you're pregnant on important days in your relationship, right?"
Maddy laughed a little, looking at the test sitting on the counter.
"When are you gonna tell him?"
"I have no idea"
There was a knock on the door to the bathroom. Maddy was immediately brought back to Paris, minus the tears. Like David had said before, this wasn't her first rodeo. She was less scared than she would be, since her doctors had also attributed her most recent case of Guillain Barre to a virus she had brushed off as a cold a bit earlier rather than actually having Cecelia.
"What are you doing in there?" Mrs. Laurent called through the door. Maddy immediately threw the test in the box and into a bag which she tossed under the sink.
"Just finished exfoliating my face" Maddy called back, as Elle shook her head at her.
The two exited the bathroom and Maddy immediately began the process of getting hair and makeup done.
Three hours later, Maddy was walking down the aisle towards David, who was clearly crying. She smiled reaching him at the front. She looked over at Cecelia who was standing next to Elle. She signed Hello beautiful to her, making her grin.
Maddy and David had hired an interpreter for Cecelia, so she wouldn't be left out from the wedding. They knew she was too young to understand fully, but it was important to them that she always knew what was going on.
The ceremony was beautiful. If people weren't crying already at the fact that Maddy and David had essentially overcome all odds to get to be standing at the altar, nobody in the room had dry eyes after Elle read a Neil Gaiman poem.
This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.
Only that the world out there is complicated,and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain, and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,and not to be alone.
It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.
Somebody's got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you or send for the army to rescue them.
It's not two broken halves becoming one.
It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home because home is wherever you are both together.
So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing.
Like a book without pages or a forest without trees.
Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours, and it's a road you can only learn by walking it, a dance you cannot be taught, a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.
