"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections -sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life."
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
45
As I continued to think back, I guess the hardest concept for me to make sense of in the year that my sister died wasn't the mere fact that she was gone. It was the question of how a world in which she could be taken away from me so horrifically could be the same world that could endow me with Edward Cullen within the span of a few short months? Was that the deal – that in order to have one miraculous thing, you had to lose something else? But then I thought surely not, because surely it should only cost one beautiful life for me to have a happy future, so where did losing a second person come into all that? And what about Alice, who had Jasper and her pregnant belly, but lost Rose and Renee and another unborn child?
By January, I'd found a new place though. A place where I could revel in the happiness of Edward and not feel any heaviness of Rose. She was joy and light and memory. I don't have to be the girl whose sister died, the woman whose mother was shot. I'd worked out how to just be Bella Swan again: no explanatory sentence about me after my name required. That doesn't mean I don't carry them with me. It just means that I don't carry them around me like a veil of death; they burst out of me in the gift of getting to live my life; in being able to be proud of Rose when Ben succeeds, because even though she's not there, he's all her; in being able to watch Alice become a wonderful mother to her own child despite her fears; in being able to spend time with my family and Edward's family doing everything or simply nothing, enjoying each other's company.
"Edward? What's this?" I asked across the bedroom. I was standing in my underwear about to pull a top out of the chest of drawers and get dressed to meet his parents for brunch.
"What's what, gorgeous?"
"This. In the box you gave me." I was still staring at it where it sat in front of me on the wooden surface of the drawers. It was always there as a reminder but today there was something different. The fluttering of nerves and anxiousness in my stomach was finally of a different kind – the good kind, not the impending doom kind.
"Oh, that," he said, so casually. "It's something I want you to have, when you're ready. I thought that was a good place to keep it safe."
I pulled my eyes away from the heart-shaped box, and the large princess diamond that had me transfixed, to look at the man who had my heart transfixed. Fresh from the shower, he had one charcoal grey towel wrapped around his hips and was rubbing excess water from his hair with another.
"What if I am ready? What happens then?" My voice was barely a whisper.
He swallowed and stopped toweling his hair.
"I know you're a little scared. I know your fears of life and death and everything in between. And I've also seen you overcome those and start living again as if they don't matter. So I know you're ready. And if my job and my time with you have taught me anything, it's that life is horribly short. Whether you leave it at five, thirty-five, or eighty-five, it's never going to be long enough with those that you love. When I know so clearly what I want and need, and that I want and need it for the rest of my life, then I'm not going to waste a single second more being without it."
He closed the distance between us and stood in front of me.
"I want and need you, Bella Swan. There might not be rhyme or reason to it in your mind, but that's because love can't really be defined that simply. We've learned that together. I just know. I know it with every tiny part of me. I love you. And that love makes me want and need you to be my wife with all of my being. So marry me, Bella. Marry me?"
There was this part of me that wanted to ask a hundred questions including "Are you fucking serious right now?" and "Are you sure you're sure?" But I knew the answers to all of those. The other part of me was utterly speechless and couldn't find a way to form mouth movements into spoken words. My heart knew how though. It knew not to wait a second longer without giving him the answer we both deserved.
"Yes. Yes! So very much yes –" He shut me up by scooping me up and kissing me with fervor. I practically climbed him the rest of the way to wrap my legs around his waist, feeling giddy and truly weightless for the first time in a long time.
There was one more gift of life that the loss of the previous year allowed to flourish more intensely for me. The gift of being able to marry a man who loves me more than anything in the world and about whom I feel the same.
This was happiness.
It still existed.
And everything felt like it was going to be okay.