Chapter 14 - The Proposal
Marco proposed on a Tuesday evening, in the private event space at Marchetti's, after a dinner service he'd helped me plan for weeks under the guise of a wine-pairing consultation that I'd been too distracted to question closely enough.
It wasn't extravagant the way Nathaniel's rooftop proposal over Lake Michigan had been nine years earlier — no elaborate staging, no orchestrated surprise involving people I barely knew. It was just the two of us, at a small table in the back of the restaurant my family had built from nothing, surrounded by the smell of my father's sauce and the quiet hum of a Tuesday evening service winding down.
"I know you've had a proposal before that turned out to mean something very different than it promised," he said, turning a small velvet box over in his hands. "I'm not going to pretend I can undo what that experience cost you, or promise you a life with no difficulty in it, because that wouldn't be honest. What I can promise is that I will never once make you feel small for taking up space, that I will never treat your family as anything less than my own, and that whatever we build together will be something we build as equals, not something one of us tolerates the other to be part of."
I said yes before he'd finished the sentence, which felt, in retrospect, like an echo of the same eager certainty I'd felt nine years earlier — except this time, I understood, with hard-won clarity, exactly what I was saying yes to.
My family's reaction, when we told them at the following Sunday dinner, was immediate and overwhelming — my mother in tears within seconds, my father shaking Marco's hand with the particular firm, searching grip he used to assess anyone he was deciding whether to trust, my five brothers taking turns pulling Marco aside throughout the evening for conversations he later described, laughing, as "somewhere between a job interview and an intervention."
"Dominic asked me what my five-year financial plan was," Marco told me afterward, still slightly stunned. "Gabriel actually pulled up a spreadsheet on his phone. Luca wanted to know my position on prenuptial agreements, which I appreciated more than I expected to, honestly, given everything."
"And what did you tell him?"
"That I'd sign whatever protected you most fully, because I have no interest in a marriage where either of us needs to worry about the other one's motives."
We married the following spring, in a small ceremony at the restaurant rather than any of the grand venues the Coles would have insisted upon nine years earlier — string lights instead of chandeliers, my father's cooking instead of a catering company's careful plating, my mother crying through the entire ceremony, all five of my brothers standing beside me rather than sitting in reserved seats, because I'd asked each of them, individually, to walk me partway down the aisle, unable to choose just one to give that particular honor to.
I wore a dress I chose entirely myself, in a color I actually loved, with no input from anyone whose approval I felt obligated to seek.
May you like
Standing at the altar, looking at Marco's face — open, steady, genuinely happy in a way that had nothing to do with performance for an audience — I thought, briefly, of the ballroom where my first marriage had effectively ended, of the beam and the rope and the sixty guests who had watched in silence.
The distance between that night and this one felt, in that moment, immeasurable.
