Page 90 of For Never & Always

He took her face in his hands and kissed her, and the Ferris wheel stopped at the bottom. They broke apart sheepishly as the ride operator came to lift the seat bar.

“So, funny thing,” he said as they disembarked, “about the rabbi and the ketubah.”

She blinked at him.

“There is one…on the back lawn. Also a chuppah, and a lot of chairs, and your parents, and my parents, and your entire extended family, and Noelle might have bought a tux and there’s a dress upstairs for you that Marisol picked out.” He breathed out the words in a rush.

“If you want it. I mean. We don’t have to get married right now.” He sped up, if that were possible, while she looked at him in shock. “But you said you didn’t want to have to plan a wedding, with everything else you have going on, so yeah, we could get married right now. Tonight. If you were serious.”

Hannah took a deep breath. “I can’t believe you pulled off a secret wedding.” She grinned at him. “We got back together, like, two minutes ago.”

“I have learned event planning at the foot of the master. Also, Miriam helped a lot. So, you want to do it?”

She’d never made him so nervous in all their lives. Not even the first time he’d asked her to marry him.

“I’ll go get changed,” she said, and he picked her up and swung her around, whooping.

“SHENANIGANS!” he yelled to anyone around to listen.

Elijah and Jason’s twins acted as flower children, dancing up the aisle full of cotton candy and mischief. Noelle stood as Hannah’s best woman, and Miriam was Levi’s groomswoman. The two of them were making such outlandish heart eyes at each other that Levi glared at Noelle, leaning across Rabbi Ruth to whisper, “Just ask her already, or I’m going to. Your ass better get moving if you want a Carrigan’s Christmas wedding.”

Noelle shushed him. “She’ll hear you!”

Levi smirked.

“I already have a spot marked off for you in my calendar if you ever get your act together,” Rabbi Ruth added, and Noelle blushed.

Hannah walked toward him, and he thought he might astral project from happiness. His face already hurt from the unfamiliar act of smiling so much, and they hadn’t even started the ceremony yet. He heard Rabbi Ruth’s voice, as if through a dream, telling them to walk around each other, to kiss. When they lifted him up in his chair, he truly thought he might fly.

He looked at Hannah. She was so radiantly beautiful he forgot to breathe, until his father yelled over the music, “I’m proud of you, kid. I’m glad you’re home.”

He was, too. Home, and glad.

Epilogue

Alittle more than a month before Cass’s yahrzeit, they were sitting in the tiny lemon-yellow kitchen of their quirky little married apartment on a very rare Friday night off from Carrigan’s, picking at the ends of takeout by the light of the Shabbat candles. Levi had his legs stretched out all the way to the other side of the tiny vintage Formica table Miriam had found for them, with Hannah’s feet in his lap.

A bright late-summer moon shone in, August just turned to September, the long busy days inching to the High Holy Days again, their first time in this new place.

Their apartment was part of an old Tudor revival mansion in Lake Placid that had been segmented into flats. For reasons that escaped logic, the owners had built the kitchens into the faux tower. As soon as she’d seen it, Hannah had known they had to live there, because Cass would have loved it so much. The memory of Cass brought a sharper pain these days, with more teeth than it had, but she couldn’t pass up something that would have so delighted her aunt.

Besides, she might have cut off all her Rapunzel hair, but she could still eat her yogurt in a tower like a princess.

The rest of the space—a cluttered efficiency with very quirky antique furniture, some Carrigan’s, some Miriam’s, from every era and an equally antique radiator that Hannah feared might not hold its own against winter nights—reminded her of a set fromBarefoot in the Park. They weren’t really newlyweds, but they were newly married, and they did need the space to themselves.

She understood now why Noelle had been so quick to build Miriam a place for them to live in the carriage house, apart from the main house at Carrigan’s. It felt impossibly small after living in the hotel for most of the past twenty years, and it felt gigantic at night when they left the bedroom doors open and had all that space to themselves instead of a cramped hotel suite.

It felt like a choice she’d made out of joy instead of fear, even if it also felt like a long damned commute when she had an early morning event at the Christmasland.

Levi hummed contentedly from his seat, and she looked over to see him watching her with a soft, easy smile. She would never take it for granted how comfortable they were together, again, finally. Well, she probablywouldtake it for granted, but she hoped she’d remember quickly. There was no “of course” about her and Blue, no matter how inevitable they had once seemed. It had taken marriage counseling and therapy, and they still sometimes found themselves falling into old patterns and having to fish each other out.

She was smiling lazily back at him, thinking she should mention the shabbat mitzvah of a husband bringing his wife sexual pleasure, when their phones both rang.

“I thought you turned yours off!” Hannah said, kicking him lightly.

“I thought you turnedyoursoff.” Levi raised an eyebrow at her.

“I only left it on because Noelle was maybe going to really, really need me to give her a pep talk…”She picked up her phone to peek at the caller ID. “It’s her. Should I? Can I?”

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