Updated Apr 7, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 26: Thirty Guests and Wildflowers
Ryder
The thing about planning a wedding with Emma was that Emma had a system, and the system worked, and approximately forty percent of the chaos was Luna.
This was fine. He had anticipated this.
What he had not anticipated was the extent to which Luna had opinions not just about her own role — flower girl, which she had been told early and accepted as both obvious and correct — but about every adjacent element: the flowers (she wanted sunflowers; Emma gently introduced the concept of wildflower arrangements and Luna spent forty-eight hours thinking about it before pronouncing “okay but there should also be some yellow ones”), the venue (“it has to feel like a house,” which turned out to be exactly the direction Emma had already been going, and they had found the restored Craftsman in Capitol Hill with its wide-plank floors and open garden space), and, crucially, the music.
“Not sad music,” Luna had announced, at the kitchen table, eating cereal, with the gravity of someone who has considered this carefully.
“Not sad music,” Ryder agreed.
“Ceremony music can be a little serious,” Emma said, diplomatically. “Serious isn’t the same as sad.”
Luna had chewed this over along with her cereal. “Okay. But I want something good at the party part.”
“The reception,” Emma said.
“The party part,” Luna repeated, immovable on terminology.
The venue had come together quickly — Emma’s instinct for logistics meeting the Craftsman space’s existing warmth and producing something that felt like exactly what they wanted: thirty guests, wildflowers, the ceremony in the garden under the pergola if the weather held (Seattle had been informed of this preference and was being considered in some measure). The florist was a woman Emma had found who did wild-gathered arrangements, asymmetrical and lush, the kind that looked like they’d been cut from an actual field. Emma had sent her a photo of the rib tattoo, the botanical piece, and said “something in this register,” and the florist had looked at the photo and said “I understand perfectly,” which was one of the great satisfactions of life, Ryder thought — the moment when someone just understood.
Jax, when informed he was best man, had been quiet for approximately three seconds and then said “okay” in a voice that meant considerably more than the word. They had not discussed it further because they didn’t need to.
The suit question had been interesting. Ryder owned one good jacket and had not worn it in two years. Emma had looked at him for a long moment when he floated the jacket option and said, carefully, “I think you should be comfortable and exactly yourself, and I also think that if you want to wear a suit I’ll help you find one that doesn’t make you look like you borrowed it.”
They had found a dark green suit, almost olive, that looked like it had been made for someone who had a black-and-grey sleeve tattoo and read Camus. Emma had looked at him in the mirror of the tailor’s shop with an expression that had made him reconsider a number of life decisions in the direction of finding more occasions to wear a suit.
“That’s the one,” she’d said.
He’d bought it.
Frank Lawson called on a Tuesday evening in March, three weeks before the wedding. Ryder almost didn’t answer — he was in the middle of a booking — and then saw who it was and handed his client a ten-minute break and went to the back room.
“Mr. Lawson,” he said.
“Ryder.” A pause. Frank Lawson spoke the way a man spoke when he’d been rehearsing something and was now committed to getting through it. “I called to say — my wife and I. We’re glad. That you’re — that Emma is happy. We can see she’s happy.”
Ryder waited.
“I didn’t —” Another pause, the careful kind. “I had some ideas about what would be right for her. I understand they were my ideas and not necessarily hers.”
“She knows her own mind,” Ryder said.
“She does.” Something warm, briefly, in Frank Lawson’s voice. “She always did. I wasn’t always — I don’t think I made it easy for her to use it.” A beat. “She’s more herself now than I’ve seen her in a long time.”
“I’d like to take some credit for that,” Ryder said, “but mostly she did it herself.”
Frank was quiet for a moment. Ryder thought he might have laughed, very quietly. “I appreciate you saying that.” And then, in the tone of a man crossing a specific bridge: “I’m glad she found you. I wanted to tell you that directly.”
“Thank you, sir,” Ryder said, and meant it.
After he hung up he sat in the back room for a moment. The shop smelled like ink and the particular electrical hum of machines and someone out front had put on Coltrane at a low, steady volume. He thought about Frank Lawson, who had fixed his hair wrong for thirty years and was now, with the stiffness of a man who has very little practice with this kind of thing, reaching across the distance he’d made.
He thought: Emma had come from somewhere. The woman she was now had not come from nowhere. She had come from people who’d built walls around her and she had climbed over them anyway, and the fact that her father was now standing on the other side of the wall looking a little sheepish was — he found it moved him, unexpectedly. Not forgiveness. Just complexity. People were their whole histories and their better choices both.
He went back to his client. He finished the booking. He texted Emma: *Your dad called.*
Three dots. Then: *I know. He told me he was going to. Are you okay?*
*More than okay. You?*
*Happy. Are you done soon? I have leftover pasta.*
He smiled at his phone in the way he had come to know as slightly embarrassing and didn’t care.
*Give me an hour,* he sent, and put the phone away and went back to work.
Three weeks. The wildflowers were ordered. The suit was hanging in the studio closet. The ring — her rings, now, the original and the stacking band he’d designed to go with it — were side by side in the sock drawer, where they would stay for two more weeks and then never return.
Luna had announced, the previous weekend, that she had prepared a speech.
“A speech?” Carla had said, over the phone, in the tone of a woman who was simultaneously charmed and concerned.
“She says she has remarks,” Ryder said. “I think we have to let her.”
“Absolutely we let her. I just need to know — are they going to make me cry?”
He thought about his daughter, six years old and entirely certain of herself, standing in front of thirty people with something to say. He thought about Emma’s face when she heard whatever Luna had to say.
“Almost certainly,” he said.
He was right about a lot of things.
Reader Reactions