ARIA'S POV
She'd thought she would be nervous standing here.
She'd prepared for nervous...had braced for it on the walk down the path, had told herself she was allowed to feel it, that feeling it didn't mean anything except that this mattered.
She wasn't nervous.
She was...present. Completely, entirely present in a way she almost never was, in a way that her brain which was always running three things simultaneously had never quite managed. Just here. Just this. Just him in front of her with his whole face showing everything he felt and sixty people behind her and peonies and a cellist and the east garden in the morning light.
The celebrant spoke.
She heard the words and felt them land...not abstractly, not as ceremonial language, but actually. The weight of them. What it meant to say them out loud in front of the people who knew the whole story.
Damien said his vows first.
