Updated Apr 6, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 25: Vows (draft One)
Scarlett
Three months postpartum, Wren had opinions about everything. She had opinions about the angle of her bottle and the specific song that Declan sang at 2 a.m. — not just any song; *that* song, the one he’d started singing in week two, something half-original that she had never asked about and he had never explained, and if he changed it or stopped she made it known. She had opinions about being set down versus being held. She had opinions about the light in the living room at six in the evening.
Scarlett found this entirely relatable. She had also been three months old once, she assumed, and she was told she had been very particular. Her mother had said this at Christmas with the expression of someone presenting evidence.
The point was: Wren was opinionated. Wren was, at three months, already herself.
Scarlett was figuring out who she was at twenty-nine and three months postpartum and very engaged, which was its own interesting data set.
“We should talk about the wedding,” she said on a Sunday in April, sitting on Declan’s kitchen floor with Wren on the activity mat between them, both of them watching their daughter discover her own hands with the expression of two people who found this more interesting than it had any right to be.
“I’ve been thinking about the wedding,” Declan said.
“I know you have. You have a document.”
“I always have a document.”
“Show me the document.”
He pulled his phone out and handed it over. The document had a header that said *WEDDING — WORKING NOTES* and subheadings that included Venue, Logistics, Guest Count (Target: small), and Vows — personal, needs draft. The Guest Count section had a number in it: twenty-four.
Twenty-four.
She looked up.
“I ran a count,” he said. “Our actual people. People we’d call at midnight if something went wrong. People Wren is going to know her whole life. It came to twenty-four.”
Something settled in her, warm and exact. She handed the phone back. “Twenty-four,” she agreed.
They had been to weddings — the industry circuit produced weddings the way it produced award shows, seasonally, overlapping, elaborate and beautiful and entirely about the performance of a relationship for an audience of two hundred. She had been to weddings where she didn’t know most of the guests. She had been to weddings where the couple hadn’t spoken to each other for most of the reception.
She did not want that.
She had not known, before this, what she wanted instead. She hadn’t let herself look directly at the wanting. But sitting on the kitchen floor with Wren between them and a ring on her hand and a list of twenty-four names that included both their families and Priya and Sean and three or four others who had earned the designation *actual people* — she knew.
Small. Just them. Somewhere that was theirs.
“The roof,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Your roof. The building’s roof. You said the management company had done events up there before — the holiday thing last December —”
“I already called them,” he said. “I called them in February.”
She stared at him. “You called the building management in February.”
“I wanted to know if it was possible. Permits, capacity, event approval. I wasn’t — I didn’t want to push the timeline before you were ready, I just wanted to know if it was available.”
“And?”
“It’s available. June or September, they have two dates. I didn’t book anything.”
“June,” she said immediately.
He nodded, like that had also been his answer.
“June,” he said. “End of June. Wren will be five months.”
She looked at Wren, who had moved on from her hands to the discovery that her feet were also attached to her body and was processing this revelation with considerable focus.
“She’ll be the best person at the wedding,” Scarlett said.
“She’ll be asleep for all of it and make no decisions about any of it.”
“That’s the best wedding guest to have.”
“You’re not wrong.”
They sat there for a moment, both looking at their daughter.
Priya said yes to maid of honor before Scarlett finished the sentence; she had already, it emerged, bought a dress months ago. “I ordered it after the ginger tea,” she said, which Scarlett was going to have to let go of and never examine too closely. Sean said yes to best man with an enthusiasm that made Declan slightly suspicious and Scarlett correctly identify as a man who had also prepared a speech. Both families were given the date and the instruction: *small*, *meaningful*, *please no input on the centerpieces*, and both families, with varying degrees of compliance, largely agreed.
It was the vows she was thinking about at midnight, with Wren asleep on her chest in the rocker in the nursery, because Wren had a preference about where she fell asleep and the rocker was the preference tonight.
She had the legal pad on the side table. She was writing her vows in installments, the way she did everything she wanted to get right: not all at once, not under pressure, but a little at a time until the shape of it emerged.
She had written: *I was very good at not trusting people, and then I met you.*
She had crossed that out. Too blunt.
She had written: *You learned how I take my coffee before I told you, and I know this seems small, but I’d been telling people how I take my coffee for six years and nobody had learned it and —*
Too long.
She had written: *I said no the first time you asked. I need you to understand that the no was true and the yes was also true and neither one was about logistics or fear. The no was about not knowing yet. The yes was about knowing.*
She stopped. She read it back.
She crossed out the first sentence.
She started again:
*I need you to understand that I’ve known the answer since the delivery room. But if I’m being more honest than that, I’ve known it since the parking lot. Since the ginger tea. Since the crib, midnight, second attempt. I’ve known it the way I know the things that are true past the point of arguing with them: completely and with some stubbornness about admitting it.*
She looked at Wren. Wren’s face in sleep was the most peaceful thing Scarlett had ever seen.
She started to cry, which she’d been doing a lot lately, and edited the vows to acknowledge it once so it would be accounted for when she delivered them.
Tomorrow she would write more. Tonight she had this: the beginning of the truth, in her own words, as a draft.
She had never been better at drafts than she was now. That was something she was learning at twenty-nine, postpartum, engaged: that the draft was allowed to be imperfect. That the first version of something wasn’t the final version and that was not a failure, that was how the right thing got made.
She was going to cry once at the wedding and laugh twice and hold Declan’s hands and tell him the truth, which was that she had made every decision correctly including the ones that had looked wrong from the outside.
She folded the legal pad. Wren breathed in her sleep.
June, she thought. End of June. The roof with the fairy lights and twenty-four people and the man who had timed the route to the hospital in advance and had shown up in every way she required.
She was going to marry the hell out of that man.
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