By the time autumn had settled fully over the countryside, turning the gardens gold and amber, Rhys asked her to marry him beneath the very same trees where they'd first properly spoken as something more than strangers. And Avalene, who had spent three years believing herself invisible, said yes without a single moment's hesitation.
The wedding, when it came, was neither grand nor performative: held in the small stone chapel near Ashcombe Hall rather than the cathedral custom might have dictated, attended by a modest gathering of those who had actually earned a place in Avalene's life, rather than those who merely wished to be seen at a duke's wedding.
The morning of the ceremony began quietly, long before the guests arrived, with Avalene sitting at the small dressing table in her chamber at Ashcombe Hall, while Martha worked careful pins into hair that had once gone unbrushed for days at a time in a house that hadn't cared whether she was presentable to anyone at all. The irony of it wasn't lost on her that she should come to be dressed with such tenderness in the very house whose owner had once knocked on a door meant to keep him out.
"You're trembling," Martha observed, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
"I keep waiting to wake up," Avalene admitted. "It still doesn't feel entirely real. Some mornings I expect to open my eyes and find myself back in that attic room, the whole of it nothing but a dream I invented to survive the winter."
"It's real," Martha said firmly, resting her weathered hands on Avalene's shoulders. "Every bit of it. You earned this simply by being exactly who you were, even when no one around you seemed to value it. That's not a dream, my dear. That's justice: arriving later than it should have, but arriving all the same."
The gown, when Avalene finally stood to be laced into it, was not her mother's altered blue silk. That dress had been carefully preserved, folded away for a future daughter who might one day want to wear it herself. This was a new creation in soft ivory, commissioned weeks earlier with Rhys's insistence that she choose whatever pleased her most, free of any obligation to fashion or expectation. She had chosen simplicity over ornamentation: fine embroidery along the sleeves rather than excessive beading across the bodice—a gown that felt like an extension of herself rather than a costume assembled for the occasion.
Her stepmother arrived at the chamber door just as Martha finished the final pins, hovering uncertainly at the threshold in a way Avalene had never once seen her do in three years of sharing a household.
"May I come in?"
Avalene hesitated only a moment before nodding, and her stepmother crossed the room with careful, measured steps, as though uncertain of her welcome even now. She carried a small wooden box, plain and unadorned, which she set gently on the dressing table.
"Your father asked me to give you this," she said. "On your wedding day, whenever that day came. I should have given it to you sooner. I told myself I was waiting for the right moment, but the truth is I was simply too proud or too ashamed to face what giving it to you would mean."