Page 59 of The Bride Bet
She already was.
EPILOGUE
JASMINE
The dress was different this time.
It wasn’t the princess cut she’d chosen in twenty seconds flat in a bridal boutique while buzzed on champagne and trying very hard not to think about what she was doing. That dress had been fine.
But this one was hers, simple ivory silk that moved with the breeze off the water, chosen on a quiet morning with Eden and her mother beside her and no champagne at all, just three women on the floor of a Santa Monica boutique, sayingyesornot quiteuntil the right one appeared. When it did, Jasmine had stood in front of the mirror and felt, for the first time, like a bride.
A year. That was how long it had been since the date they were originally supposed to marry. The rushed, strategic wedding that never happened, the one she’d planned alone for an audience. This one had taken its time. They’d both wanted it that way.
The ceremony was at four, when the light over the water went gold and the shadows stretched long across the pale sand. Thirtypeople. Just the ones who mattered. Her mother in a blue dress she’d bought specifically for today, already crying before a word had been said. Eden, glowing in a way that had everything to do with the man seated next to her now, holding her hand, the sound engineer named Daniel, who had turned out to be exactly as good as his photograph had promised. Radha sat in the back with her arms folded and her expression the same as always, except for her eyes, which gave her away entirely.
No photographers. No Dove with a clipboard. No concocted statements or approved shot list. Just the beach, and the people, and the late afternoon.
Jasmine stood at the top of the path through the dune grass and held her mother’s arm.
“You look beautiful,” her mother said.
“Don’t make me cry before I get down there.”
“I make no promises.”
The path was the same one she’d walked the first morning at the beach house. Narrow, sandy, the ocean arriving suddenly at the bottom of it. Except now Nate was at the end of it, standing at the water’s edge in a linen suit with his sleeves already pushed up because he’d never been able to leave them down for long, and when he saw her, the expression on his face was the one she would keep forever. Not the press conference face or the boardroom face. Just him, undone, watching her come toward him like she was the only thing on the whole stretch of beach.
She made it down without crying. Mostly.
The vows were short. They’d written their own, and hers said that she’d spent years being afraid she’d have to carry everythingalone, and that she didn’t anymore, and that of all the things she’d gained back over the past year, he was the one she’d been most surprised to keep. His said that he’d built his whole life around being at the top because the top was the only place that didn’t feel like falling, and that she had taught him there was somewhere else to stand entirely, and that he intended to stand there with her for the rest of his life.
Her mother cried through all of it. So did Eden. So, to everyone’s quiet astonishment, did Radha.
The past year had not been simple, and Jasmine wouldn’t have described it as such to anyone who asked. But it had been good in the ways that counted. Nate’s confession had done its work slowly. The taking-the-blame angle, the genuine grace of it, had shifted the public story over days and then weeks until the woman in the headlines was no longer the calculating gold digger but something closer to the truth. By the time the studio came back, a month on, with the Taylor Hartner role still uncast and a new director attached, the scandal had softened into the kind of thing people found romantic rather than disqualifying. Marco had called her crying. She’d said yes before he finished the sentence.
She was managing. That was the word she’d made peace with. She wasn’t cured, not fixed, but managing, which was its own kind of victory.
She’d learned her body’s signals and started listening to them instead of overriding them. She rested before she needed to, instead of after. She worked semi-regularly now, choosing projects that fit the life she wanted rather than the career she’d once been terrified of losing, and the strange thing she hadn’t expected was that the work was better for it. She brought more to it. She had more to bring.
And Nate had changed too, in a substantial way that lasted. He’d started delegating more, handing Radha and the rest of his team the things he’d spent years insisting only he could do. He still woke at fifteen past six out of habit, but he no longer worked until two in the morning, because there was somewhere better to be, and someone better to be there with. It turned out, he told her once, that the work paid back exactly what you put in — and so did everything else, if you finally let yourself believe in it.
She’d kept the home she loved. In the end she hadn’t sold it. They split their time now between her oasis with the lemon tree and the beach house that had started all of it. What’s more, Jasmine had finally learned to use the lemons before they fell.
And it turned out that she made a pretty good lemon meringue pie, if she did say so herself.
The reception was on the sand as the sun went down. Long tables with white linens, candles in glass to keep the wind off them, the coffee made available by her mom’s special request alongside the good champagne. It was loose and warm and as unstrategic as a wedding could be. At some point Jasmine looked around at it and felt a completeness that shook her to her core.
This was her life. It wasn’t perfect, but at the same time, she had nothing she wanted to change about it. Rather, she had everything to be grateful for.
It was during dinner that one of the catering staff brought a small card to the table.
“This was left at the gate,” the young woman said. “For both of you.”
Nate took it with furrowed brows. Jasmine watched his expression as he opened it, watched the flicker of recognition. He let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a grunt.
“What?” she asked.
He turned it so she could read it.
