North Road {HS}

31. Adelaide

Tomorrow is the wedding. It will be small and simple- a gathering of friends and family in the back yard of the hill house where I've grown up. after a short ceremony following the Sunday service in the church I've attended since I was small. I've heard of nerves. I've heard of stress, but as I laid in my loves' arms on this warm, September evening I felt none of that.

I felt hope. I felt an excitement so intense I felt as if it could explode out of every pore of my body. I felt as if everything I had hoped for was coming to fruition. Tomorrow I will become a wife as well as a mother.

I had told Kitty about the baby. She yelled, then she came back and cried with me and we held each other as we fell asleep in the bed we had shared our entire lives.

Pierce and I wouldn't be going far. Just to the small lover's cabin that had once been a shed on the same property as the big house. Before the war there had been a livery man for a short period of time and he had lived there but it had fallen into disrepair since. Pierce had been working tirelessly on it since that night when I had told him about the baby and tonight he had revealed to me the work of his labors. A wood burning stove huddled heavy and dark in the corner awaiting the change in the seasons that would be soon to come when nights would be too cold for just a few warm blankets and the embrace of the one you loved. Against the wall was a modest bed covered in quilts I had spent my life making and across from the bed stood a beautiful wood table that had once been my mothers. None of it was glamorous and yet it surpassed any of my wildest dreams.

Because there in the midst of it had been Pierce with a proud smile only slightly tainted with nerves. I had flung myself into his arms desperate to display my gratitude and that was how we had ended up where we were now huddled on the sanded wood floors together- wrapped in one of the quilts I had made as a girl dreaming of days like tomorrow.

And I knew- I just knew, that if tomorrow somehow ended up not being the best day of my life, it would be just fine. Because today had been.