"Hi," he says quietly, meant only for me.
"Hi," I say back.
He squeezes my hand once, then we face forward, the ceremony begins, and I spend most of it trying not to cry, failing moderately, and not minding at all.
Later, when the dancing has been going for two hours, and Chloe has somehow convinced Sergei onto the floor, which is something I will be processing for years, Axel finds me at the edge of the garden.
He comes up behind me, arms around my waist, chin at my temple. My stomach is genuinely enormous now, round and insistent, and his hands settle over it automatically, the way they always do.
The baby kicks.
Axel makes the small satisfied sound he always makes when that happens, like he's won something.
"What are you doing out here?" he murmurs.
I pull the folded paper from the small hidden pocket Tiana insisted the seamstress add, because Tiana knows me better than I know myself. I unfold it.
The bucket list. Soft at the creases now, the ink faded in places. I read through it in the evening light.
Willingly lose virginity.Done, to put it mildly.
See the Northern Lights.Done, on a hillside with private security and a thermos and a man who remembered I wanted it.
Swim naked in the ocean.Done, in a cove at midnight.
I look at the ones that aren't crossed off. Japan. Skydiving. The tattoo.
Axel reads over my shoulder. "We're going to Japan," he says. "After she's born."
"You don't know it's a she."
"I know."
"Its a boy."
He ignores this completely. "I'll take you skydiving if you stop arguing with me about the baby's gender."
"That's not a compromise, that's a threat."
"Same thing in my world."
I laugh, and pull the pen from the same pocket, and at the bottom of the list, below everything else, I write one final item.
Build a life worth living.
Axel reads it. His arms tighten around me.
I fold the paper one last time, slowly, deliberately, and tuck it into the pocket.
I'm not going to need it anymore because my life is completely fulfilled.
The End.
Epilogue
Aurora
Six months later