Chapter 8 - I Finally Became Older Than I Expected

On our tenth anniversary, Mom asked whether I still had my wedding dress.

I did.

Preserved in a box I had not opened for years.

She suggested I wear it again.

I told her she had lost her mind.

Peter loved the idea.

Sophie, now eleven, immediately joined his side.

I lost the vote.

We returned to the historic estate where our marriage began. This time there were no 120 guests, no anonymous emails, and no question about whether the groom had been hired from an acting website.

Only family and close friends.

Dr. Patel attended.

Claire came too.

Over the years, she and Peter rebuilt a respectful friendship, and I eventually became grateful she had warned me before the first wedding. She was not trying to sabotage us.

She wanted to make sure neither of us confused rescue with love.

Daniel did not attend.

His mother survived treatment. He later married a woman he met through a caregiver support group, and they built a life somewhere far from ours. We exchanged holiday messages occasionally.

That chapter had ended without needing anyone to lose.

Dad walked me down the aisle again.

He was slower.

So was I.

The dress needed significant alterations because treatment had changed my body, but the lace still caught the light exactly the way I remembered.

Peter waited beneath white roses.

His hair had gray in it.

Mine did too.

That detail nearly broke me.

Gray hair.

I once believed I would never live long enough to have it.

When I reached him, he whispered that I looked older.

I almost hit him in front of everyone.

Then he added, “It’s my favorite thing about you.”

I understood.

Aging had become a privilege neither of us took casually.

Our vows were different.

The first time, I promised not to waste whatever time I had.

Now I could look backward at ten years I had not expected to receive.

Peter told the guests how our marriage began.

Sophie pretended to be horrified even though she had heard the story many times.

Then Peter revealed something he had never told me completely.

His demand for a legal marriage was not only about refusing to lie.

After Anna died, Peter became obsessed with the way people treated temporary things as less real. Short relationships. Short lives. Dreams interrupted before completion.

He did not want my shortened future to make the wedding a fake version of something more valuable.

“If we had one day,” he said, “I wanted that day to count. If we had fifty years, I wanted those to count too.”

We had ten.

So far.

Afterward, Sophie danced with Dad.

Mom drank champagne.

Peter stepped on my dress.

Dr. Patel left early because doctors apparently consider sleep important.

Everything was imperfect.

Everything was enough.

Near midnight, Peter and I walked outside.

He asked whether I remembered my original email.

Every humiliating word.

“I’ll pay whatever you think is fair. You only have to pretend for one day.”

I laughed.

Worst business arrangement imaginable.

Peter agreed.

He had never received payment.

Instead, he got a decade of marriage, a daughter, a mortgage, oncology appointments, several genuine fights about money, and approximately four thousand arguments about dishwasher loading.

He said he considered himself overcompensated.

We kissed beneath the trees.

For once, neither of us discussed the next scan.

We had finally learned that living around uncertainty did not require speaking its name every night.