Serena's POV
On the twenty-fourth of May, the lilacs come out all at once.
They've been threatening for a week. A purple haze along the hedge by the kitchen garden, a fat bud here, a promise there. And then, on the morning of my wedding, I draw back the curtain of my old bedroom at Windward and the whole world is lilac, a drift of it, down the lawn and round the old stone wall and over the roof of the boathouse, so thick and sweet that the air tastes of it.
I stand at the window in my slip with my hair in pins.
My wedding.
"Rena."
I turn.
Tessa's in the doorway, in a dress the colour of old rose, with a coffee in each hand and her hair in a crown of braids. She looks twenty. She looks about nine. She looks like our mother.
"You're meant to be being zipped," she says.
"I've been looking at the lilacs."
"They're very good."
"They're unreasonable."
I laugh and then, to my annoyance, my eyes sting.
"Oh, no," says Tessa.
"I'm all right."
"You'll wreck your face."
"I know."
"I'm not doing it again. I did it once. It took forty minutes."
"Tessa."
"Yes?"
"I've got something to give you."
I go to the dresser.
There's a flat white box on it, the size of a book, tied with a piece of green ribbon. I pick it up. My hands are very steady.
"I collected it in March," I say. "From the evidence room in Rockland. With the wallet and the watch. I put them in the safe, and I thought I'd wait."
"For what?"
"For today."
She stares at it. She doesn't take it.
"What is it?"
"Open it."
She unties the ribbon. She lifts the lid. Inside, on a bed of tissue paper, lies a wax-crayon drawing, curling at the edges, of a small round bird with an enormous beak, standing on a very long yellow dock.
"That's mine," I say. "I did it when I was four. Dad kept it in his wallet."
"I know." Her voice is tiny. "You told me."
"There's something underneath."
She lifts the drawing.
Under it, flat against the tissue, is a second sheet. A folded half-page of the same cream study paper. Folded four times, and stuck at the corner with a bit of tape, yellow with age. I found it the day I took the drawing out of the box. It had been stuck to the back of the card.
For Tessie. Later.
She puts down the drawing.
She holds the little paper in both hands, like something alive.
"Rena."
"I haven't read it."
"You..."
"It's yours."
"Oh, God."
She looks at me for a long, long moment, with her mouth open and her hands shaking.
"Will you stay?"
"Of course."
"I can't do it alone."
"You won't."
She unfolds the paper.
I watch her face change.
Then she gives it to me.
My Tessie,
You're nineteen now, and you think you're a nuisance. You're not. You've never been. You're the one in the house who laughs first, and I've lived on that all your life.
I've been unfair to you. I've leaned on your sister since the day she could talk, because she was steady, and she asked no questions. I never asked you for anything, and you thought that meant I didn't need you.
I needed you more.
You were the reason I came home at night.
If anything happens, you will think it was your fault. You always do. When the dog died. When Mom was ill. When the plate broke. I want you to listen: it never is. You're a child of the light. The bad things in this world happen to us from outside, and we don't have to carry them.
Look after Birdie. She'll pretend she doesn't need it.
And when you're older, if you ever do something you're ashamed of, and you will, we all do, I want you to remember this: the thing that matters is not the fall. It's who you let pick you up.
Love always,
Dad.
I give it back.
"I did the worst thing," she says, in a cracked voice.
"I know."
"I gave them your cabin."
"I know."
"I'm so sorry, Rena."
"I know. I know you are." I take her face in my hands. "He's telling you something. Do you hear it?"
"What?"
"It's who you let pick you up." I wipe a tear off her cheek with my thumb. "I'm here. I'm picking you up. Come here."
She falls into my arms.
"Right," says Tessa at last, thickly. "I'm going to need another forty minutes."
"Abel will be furious."
"He can bring a hose."
***
We marry at four, on the lawn, under an arch of white lilac and green birch.
I don't remember much.
I remember walking. A long white aisle of canvas laid over the grass. A hundred and eighty chairs, mostly filled with people I hadn't known a year ago. Hannah Cho in the second row in a dress, looking mortally embarrassed. Dana Torres in a hat. Ruth Pelletier, upright and silver, with a tear on her cheek that she'd have denied under oath. Odile and Posy, giggling like a pair of schoolgirls. Hazel Greaves in a wheelchair with the ginger cat on her lap.
I remember four hundred dockworkers, in rows at the back, standing, hats in hands, in a respectful silence you could have cut with a knife.
I remember Marcus Bell in a tie, trying very hard not to cry, and failing.
I remember Abel, in a clean oilskin, giving me his arm.
"Your pa'd be proud," he mutters.
"I know."
"He'd say you got his chin."
"Abel."
"Now, don't cry. You'll set me off."
I walk.
At the end of the aisle, under the arch, in a black suit with a white lilac in his lapel, stands a man with his hands clasped in front of him.
He's looking at me.
He's looking at me. His face is so naked, so utterly open, that I feel it like a hand. There's no armour. There's no wall. There's only a man who has waited three years and two months and nine days, with his whole heart in his eyes.
I reach him.
Abel puts my hand in his.
"Take care of her," says Abel.
"I will."
"I'm not talkin' to you." He peers up at the sky. "I'm talkin' to the water."
A ripple of laughter.
Dominic's grip tightens.
"Dearly beloved," begins the celebrant, a round cheerful woman in a green robe.
I don't hear her.
I'm looking at his face.
"Hello, wife," he mouths.
"Hello, husband."
"You look..."
"Don't."
"I have to. You look..." His eyes are wet. "I've been trying to think of the word."
"And?"
"There isn't one."
We say the vows.
They're simple. I wrote mine on the back of an envelope, in the car, and tore it up, and said what came. I say them in a voice that shakes only a little. I say that I will love him in the light and in the dark, in the fire and the water, in the boardroom and the kitchen. I say that I will never again leave a room without telling him where I'm going.
"And I," says Dominic, "will always be here."
"Whatever the water does."
"We're still here."
The celebrant sniffles.
"You may kiss the, ah, kiss each other," she says.
He kisses me.
And as we turn, hand in hand, to walk back down the aisle, I look up.
Over the heads of the crowd, over the green lawn and the old grey roof and the lilacs, I see the lighthouse. It stands on its point against the blue spring sky, white and tall, with a cap of black glass.
And, as I watch, something moves inside the glass.
A glint. A flicker. A slow, grand, golden turning, sixty years dead, picking up the afternoon sun, as the great old lens swings round on its bearings and casts a long bright finger of light across the water.
"Caleb," says Dominic, in my ear.
"What?"
"He fixed it."
"When?"
"He's been working on it since February. Every weekend. He didn't tell me." He's laughing. His eyes are full. "He said he wanted to give you something that wasn't a lie."
I turn.
At the back of the lawn, by the kitchen garden gate, a tall bearded man in a morning suit is standing alone with his hands in his pockets.
He lifts one hand.
I wave back.
I'm crying again, of course.
"Come on, Mrs Hale," says Dominic, taking my hand.
"Where?"
"There's a very long table," he says, "and a very large cake. And if I'm not mistaken," he looks over my shoulder, with a faintly worried expression, "somebody is about to make a speech."