Lily was quiet for a long time. Does Miss Emma know I'm scared? She whispered. I don't think so. You've been very brave about hiding it.
Can we tell her together? They told her the next morning. And Emma, who had wondered privately for weeks why Lily had been slightly guarded, slightly held back even as she called her Miss Emma, and climbed into her lap, listened to the whole thing, and then she did something Marcus would remember for the rest of his life. She didn't promise Lily she'd never go away because Emma didn't make promises she couldn't keep, and no one can promise that. Instead, she got down on the floor with Lily and said, "I can't promise nothing bad will ever happen.
Nobody can promise that. And if somebody promises you that they're not telling you the truth, but I can promise you this. Every single day that I'm here, I am going to choose you. Not just choose your dad. Choose you on purpose out loud.
And I'm going to keep choosing you every day for as long as I get. And I'm going to love you so much and so loud that even if something did happen someday, you'd never ever have to wonder if you were loved because you'd know. It would be so big you couldn't miss it. She took the little girl's hands. That's the promise I can make and I'm going to keep it.
Is that enough? Lily threw her arms around Emma's neck and held on and over the little girl's shoulder. Emma looked at Marcus with tears running down her face. And Marcus understood that his daughter had just finally opened the last closed door. Lily slept through the night after that.
The second hard thing came in February, and it was Ruth. She collapsed in her kitchen, the same kitchen where she'd built the war room against Gerald and Emma found her, and it was for one terrible afternoon at the hospital. Exactly the nightmare they'd all been dreading. Marcus sat in this waiting room with Emma holding her while she shook and he thought about the ice storm 5 years ago about carrying this woman's mother through the worst night of both their lives about how strange it was that he was back in a hospital waiting room again waiting on the same woman except now she was family. Now she was the mother of the woman he was going to marry.
Now she was Lily's grandmother in every way that mattered. It was her heart. But it wasn't the end. They put in a stent and Ruth, who was 78 and had opinions about everything, including her own cardiac care, was sitting up in the hospital bed by the next morning, complaining about the food and demanding to know whether anyone had remembered to water her plants. But there was a moment that first night before they knew she'd be okay, when Emma broke down completely in Marcus' arms in the hospital hallway and said the thing she'd been most afraid of.
She waited 4 years for me to get brave, Marcus. 4 years she watched me sit on my feelings about you and I finally did it and I finally get to be happy and now what if she doesn't even get to see the wedding? What if I wasted all that time and she runs out before? She's not going to run out. Marcus said though he didn't know that.
Though nobody could know that. And Emma listened to me. Those four years weren't wasted. You keep saying that they weren't. He held her face in his hands.
You needed those years. I needed those years. If you'd knocked on my door with that note two years after Denise died, I wasn't ready. And you know it, and you knew it then. That's part of why you waited.
You were reading me the whole time. You didn't move until I could actually receive it. He wiped her tears with his thumbs. You didn't waste four years being a coward. You spent four years being patient with a broken man until he could heal enough to deserve you.
There's a difference. Your mother taught me that. Actually, the night the lawsuit dropped, she said, "You don't beat people, you free them. You didn't wait out of fear, Emma. You waited out of love.
And your mother's going to be at that wedding. She'd claw her way out of this hospital before she'd miss it." Ruth was in fact at the wedding. She walked in on her own power, having refused the wheelchair, having spent four months rebuilding her strength with the ferocity of a woman who had a date on the calendar she intended to keep. She sat in the front row in a lavender dress next to Vivien, next to Gerald, who had become over the winter a genuine fixture in Lily's life, driving down twice a month with stories about Denise, and once with an entire photo album. Marcus had never seen pictures of his wife as a child that made him weep in the kitchen and then laugh through the tears when he saw the terrible haircuts.
The whole strange assembled family was there. Renee was Emma's matron of honor, which had surprised everyone until they remembered that the two women had become inseparable. Robert Patterson officiated having gotten ordained online specifically for the occasion, which he brought up approximately once every four minutes for the entire month leading up to it. Patricia Haynes did the food and told everyone the storage instructions unprompted. And Lily, Lily was the flower girl, and she took the job with the deadly seriousness she brought to everything.
And she'd been practicing her walk for 3 weeks. And when the moment came, she scattered the petals with the intense concentration of a surgeon. And then when she reached the front, she didn't go stand where she'd been told to stand. She stopped. And in front of everyone in the middle of the ceremony, six-year-old Lily Williams turned around and announced in a voice that carried across the entire backyard.
I have to say something first. Marcus, standing at the front in his his suit, felt his heart stop. Emma, halfway down the aisle on Ruth's arm, went still. "What is it, Bug?" Marcus said. Lily walked over to Emma and looked up at her and the whole backyard went silent and the little girl said, "Before you marry my dad, I want to ask you something officially." She took a breath, clearly having planned this, clearly having held it in for weeks.
"Miss Emma, will you be my mom? Not a step one, not a fake one. A real one, the forever kind." Her voice wobbled. "Because I already decided you are. I decided a long time ago.
I just wanted to ask you out loud so there's no note and no bridge and no doubt the exact words Marcus had used when he proposed. She'd been saving them. She'd been listening that whole time in the backyard and she'd taken her father's words and she'd carried them for 8 months waiting for her own moment to say them out loud. Emma made a sound that wasn't quite a word. Then she let go of Ruth's arm and she got down on her knees in her wedding dress right there in the grass and she took Lily's face in both her hands and she said, "Yes, yes, I will be your mom.