The suit fits.

That's the part I keep coming back to, standing here at the altar like a man who belongs in one. A charcoal gray three-piece that Marcus dragged me to three different stores for, muttering about how I "wasn't leaving until we found something that didn't make you look like a beached whale in a tuxedo rental." The tailor had to let the jacket out twice. The pants have a hidden elastic panel in the waistband that I'm not supposed to know about but definitely feel every time I breathe.

Seven months ago I was in my apartment, alone, eating cold pizza straight from the box and telling myself that love was something that happened to other people. Better people. Thinner people. People who didn't flinch when they caught their own reflection.

Now I'm standing in front of a hundred and twelve people—I counted them during the rehearsal, because that's the kind of thing I do when I'm terrified—waiting for a woman who's about to walk down the aisle toward me. A woman who's carrying our child.

Our child.

I still can't say those words without my throat closing up.

The organist starts playing something soft and slow, and I feel Marcus's hand land on my shoulder. His grip is heavy, calloused, the same hand that dragged me into the gym four months ago while I was still wearing Jennifer's skin and told me, "You're not dying on my watch, kid."

"Proud of you, son," he says, low enough that only I can hear it.

I don't trust myself to speak. I just nod.

And then the doors at the back of the church open, and Jennifer steps into the light.

The world goes quiet.

I mean that literally. The organ, the rustle of people standing, Maya's already-audible sniffling from her spot at the front—all of it fades to a distant hum, like someone turned down the volume on everything except her. Except the soft click of her heels on the marble floor. Except the whisper of white fabric moving with each step she takes.

She's wearing a gown that clings to every curve she's always tried to hide. The bodice hugs her—God, the way it hugs her—and then flows out over the swell of her belly, seven months of proof that we did something right, that we made something real out of all that impossible. Her chestnut hair is loose, falling in waves past her shoulders instead of in the practical braid she's worn since I met her. No glasses. She'd switched to contacts weeks ago, and I'd told her she didn't need to, that I loved the wire rims, that they were part of her. She'd laughed and said, "I know. But I want to see you clearly when I say yes."

She's holding a bouquet of yellow tulips.

My throat closes up for real this time.

I remember buying those tulips. Standing in that flower shop in Jennifer's body, my hands shaking as I handed over cash for the same flowers I'd seen in a hundred romance novels she'd described to me during those long nights in her apartment, when we were both too terrified to sleep and too wired to do anything but talk. She'd mentioned them once, offhand, in the middle of a conversation about what flowers she'd want at her wedding. "Tulips," she'd said. "Yellow ones. Everyone does roses. I want something that looks like sunshine."

I'd remembered. And now she's carrying them down the aisle toward me, and Maya is full-on crying now, ugly sobs that she's not even trying to hide, and I have to stifle a laugh because it's either that or break down completely.

Jennifer catches my eye. She's close enough now that I can see the tears in her hazel eyes, the way her lips are pressed together like she's trying not to cry either. She sees me almost-laughing, and something passes between us—that same something that's been there since the first night we held hands in my cramped apartment, two people who'd been handed each other's lives and somehow found home in the swap.

She smiles. It's wobbly and bright and so achingly her that I forget how to breathe.

The minister says something. I don't hear a word of it. I'm too busy watching Jennifer hand her bouquet to Maya, who's now openly weeping into a handkerchief that Marcus produced from somewhere, and take my hands in hers.

Her hands are warm. They're the hands I wore for weeks, the hands that signed a publishing contract and typed the final chapter of a novel I fell in love with before I fell in love with its author. I know these hands. I know the small scar on her left thumb from a paper cut that got infected. I know the way she drums her fingers when she's thinking. I know the exact pressure of her grip when she's scared and holding on to me anyway.

"Dearly beloved," the minister begins.

I look at Jennifer. Really look at her. The woman who woke up in my body and didn't run. The woman who looked at my three-hundred-pound frame and saw something worth fighting for instead of something to be ashamed of. The woman who dragged me into Marcus's gym and made me lift weights until my arms shook, who told me I was beautiful when I couldn't see it, who signed a contract to publish the novel she'd been hiding for years because she finally believed she deserved to be seen.

The woman who's carrying my child.

I don't know how I got this lucky.

I mean that. I've spent forty years of my life convinced that I was invisible, that no woman would ever look twice at me, that the best I could hope for was a quiet life alone with my computer and my games and my carefully managed expectations. And then lightning struck, and I woke up in her body, and she woke up in mine, and somehow—through the terror and the confusion and the sheer absurdity of it all—we found each other.

We found each other.

I'm standing at an altar in a suit that fits, about to marry the love of my life, and I still can't quite believe it's real.

"Patrick," the minister says, and I realize he's looking at me expectantly.

Right. Vows.

I've been over this moment a hundred times in my head. I wrote my vows on a napkin in a diner at three in the morning, then rewrote them on actual paper, then memorized them, then forgot them, then panic-wrote new ones in the car on the way here. I have them in my pocket. I pull out the folded piece of paper, hands shaking, and Jennifer laughs—a soft, wet sound that makes my heart stutter.

"You wrote them down?" she whispers.

"I didn't trust my brain not to short-circuit," I whisper back.

She squeezes my hands. "Read them."

I unfold the paper. My handwriting is terrible—it always has been, a scrawl that looks like a spider fell in ink and had a seizure—but I know these words. I know them the way I know the sound of her breathing in the dark, the way I know the exact shade of her eyes in morning light, the way I know I'd do anything to keep her safe.

"Jennifer," I start, and my voice cracks on her name.

I clear my throat. Start again.

"Jennifer. I spent forty years of my life convinced I wasn't worth loving. I looked in the mirror and saw someone who didn't deserve to be seen, someone who'd given up on the idea that anyone could ever want him. And then you—" I stop, because my throat is closing up again, and Jennifer's eyes are spilling over, and Maya is sobbing so loudly that Marcus has to put an arm around her.

"And then you woke up in my body," I continue, "and you didn't run. You looked at the life I'd built—the isolation, the loneliness, the quiet acceptance of being invisible—and you didn't run. You fought for me. You dragged me into a gym and made me believe I could be stronger. You looked at me in a body that wasn't yours and you saw me. You saw me, Jennifer. No one had ever seen me before."

She's crying openly now. So am I. I don't care.

"I vow to make you fall in love with me every single day," I say. "Not because I think you'll stop loving me—I know you won't, because you're stubborn and you love hard and you don't give up on people. But because you deserve to be loved like that. You deserve someone who shows up every morning and chooses you, not out of obligation, but because there's nowhere else I'd rather be."

I take a breath. The paper is shaking in my hands.

"I vow to be the man you saw when I couldn't see myself. I vow to hold your hand in the dark and dance with you in the kitchen and read every book you write before anyone else gets to. I vow to be a good father to this little one"—my voice breaks on that, and I have to stop, because the idea of being someone's father is still too big, too bright, too much—"and I vow to never, ever let you forget that you're the best thing that ever happened to me."

I look at her. "You're the best thing that ever happened to me, Jennifer. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life proving it."

She's crying so hard she can't speak. She just shakes her head, like she can't believe it either, and pulls me into a kiss that's probably not how weddings are supposed to go—the minister hasn't even asked for rings yet—but I don't care. I don't care about anything except the way her lips feel against mine, the way she's holding onto me like I'm the one keeping her upright, the way she's laughing and crying at the same time.

Someone in the audience cheers. Then someone else. Then the whole church erupts, and the minister clears his throat and says, "Well, I suppose that's as good a declaration as any. The rings, if you please."

Marcus steps forward, grinning like the proud father he's become, and hands me the rings. Two simple bands—mine is plain gold, hers has a small diamond that cost more than my first car but was worth every penny. I slide hers onto her finger, and she slides mine onto mine, and the minister says the words that make it official, and then we're kissing again and the organist is playing something triumphant and Maya is throwing flower petals like she's been waiting her whole life for this moment.

She has been, actually. She told me so. At length. Multiple times.

We walk back down the aisle hand in hand, and Jennifer leans into me, her belly pressing against my side, and whispers, "You wrote that on the car ride here, didn't you?"

"Maybe."

"I could tell. You had pen marks on your fingers."

I look at my hands. She's right. There's a smear of blue ink on my thumb.

"I panicked," I admit. "I wrote three versions and then forgot all of them."

She laughs, bright and free, and I'd do it all again just to hear that sound. I'd get struck by lightning a hundred times, wake up in a hundred wrong bodies, fight through a hundred impossible days, just to hear her laugh like that.

The reception is a blur of champagne and cake and people I don't know congratulating me on marrying a woman who's clearly out of my league. Jennifer's publisher is here—a sharp-eyed woman named Delia who'd read the manuscript and called it "the most honest romance I've ever encountered." She'd asked Jennifer, at the engagement party, if the book was autobiographical. Jennifer had looked at me and smiled and said, "It is now."

I think about that as I watch Jennifer across the room, laughing at something Maya's saying, her hand resting on the swell of her belly. The book is already out. It's been out for three months. It's a bestseller. The royalties are paying for this wedding, for the apartment we bought together, for the nursery we've been slowly filling with everything a baby could possibly need. People read Jennifer's book and think it's fiction. They don't know that the love story in those pages is ours. They don't know that the couple who falls in love against all odds, who find each other in the most impossible circumstances, who fight for each other when everything says they shouldn't—they don't know that's us.

They don't know about the lightning. They don't know about the swap. They don't know that I wore her body for weeks, that she wore mine, that we fell in love from the inside out, that we know each other in ways no other couple ever could.

And they never will.

That's the vow I made to myself, standing in Jennifer's apartment the night before the wedding, watching her sleep with her hand on her belly and her hair spread across the pillow. I'd promised her, then, that I'd never tell anyone. That the swap would be our secret, ours alone, something we carried together into the life we were building. She'd woken up just enough to mumble, "That's not fair. The story's too good not to tell."

"We'll tell our kid someday," I'd said. "When they're old enough to understand."

She'd smiled, still half-asleep. "Yeah. Someday."

Now, watching her at our wedding, surrounded by people who love her, I think about that someday. About the child growing inside her who will never know that their parents met in the most impossible way, that their father used to be a different person—literally—that their mother fell in love with a man she'd never really seen until she was wearing his skin.

I think about the look on Jennifer's face when she'd told me she was pregnant. We'd been back in our own bodies for two weeks, still adjusting, still reeling from the impossibility of it all. She'd walked into the apartment with a little plastic stick in her hand, her face pale, her eyes wide, and said, "Patrick. I think—I think we're going to have a baby."

I'd stood there, frozen, my brain refusing to process the words. "But—how? I mean, I know how, but—we weren't—I was in your body, and you were in mine, and—"

"The night we—" She'd stopped, blushing. "The night we, you know. When I was in your body. I was ovulating. And we didn't use—we didn't think about—"

"You were in my body," I'd said slowly. "So the baby is—"

"Yours. Biologically yours. I was carrying your—" She'd stopped again, her blush deepening. "It's your baby, Patrick. I don't know how it works, but it worked."

I'd crossed the room in three steps and pulled her into my arms, and we'd stood there in the middle of my cramped apartment, holding each other and crying and laughing and crying again, overwhelmed by the impossibility of it all. Our baby. Our impossible, impossible baby, conceived in the most impossible way, proof that even when the universe throws chaos at you, something beautiful can come out of it.

Now, at our wedding, I watch her across the room and I think about all of it. The lightning. The swap. The terror of those first days, pretending to be each other, fumbling through each other's lives. The slow, terrifying realization that we were falling in love. The first kiss in my apartment, interrupted by Marcus's knock. The second kiss, in the dark, when we'd confessed our loneliness and committed to facing the unknown together. The night we'd made love for the first time, in each other's bodies, and I'd whispered that I loved her and meant it with every fiber of my being.

And now this. A wedding. A baby. A future we'd built out of nothing but faith and stubbornness and love.

I don't know how I got this lucky.

I don't think I ever will.

The DJ starts playing a slow song, and Jennifer catches my eye from across the room. She tilts her head, a question, and I'm already moving toward her, weaving through the crowd of people who don't know the half of what brought us here.

"Dance with me," she says, and it's not a question.

I take her hand. "Always."

We move onto the dance floor, and she wraps her arms around my neck, and I rest my hands on the curve of her waist, just above the swell of her belly. She's so small in my arms—she always has been, even when I was wearing her body, even when I was looking at the world through her eyes. I'd felt fragile in her skin, delicate in a way I'd never felt in my own. And now she's here, in my arms, carrying our child, and I'm the one who gets to hold her.

"You know," she says, her cheek against my chest, "I never thought I'd get this."

"Me neither."

"I spent so long hiding. From everyone. From myself." She looks up at me, her hazel eyes bright. "I thought if I made myself small enough, invisible enough, I'd be safe. I thought love was something that happened to other people. Pretty people. People who weren't afraid of being seen."

"I know," I say. "I felt the same way."

"But then you saw me." Her voice cracks. "You saw me, Patrick. Even when I was wearing your body, even when I was trying so hard to be someone else, you saw me."

I pull her closer, my hand splaying across her back, feeling the warmth of her through the white fabric of her gown. "You saw me too. You're the only person who ever has."

She laughs, wet and bright. "We're a mess, aren't we?"

"The biggest mess." I kiss her forehead. "The best mess."

We sway together, and I'm not thinking about the hundred people watching us, or the photographer capturing every moment, or the caterer who's going to start serving dinner in twenty minutes. I'm thinking about her. About us. About the impossible, beautiful, ridiculous luck that brought us here.

And I'm thinking about the promise I made to her, in the dark of my apartment, when we were both too scared to sleep and too wired to do anything but hold each other.

Together. We do it together.

The song ends, and Jennifer pulls back just enough to look at me. Her eyes are wet, but she's smiling—that full, bright, unguarded smile that she only gives me, the one that makes me forget every year I spent alone.

"I love you, Patrick Schmidt," she says.

"I love you too, Jennifer." I pause. "Or should I say Jennifer Schmidt now?"

She laughs. "I'm keeping Howe. It's on the book cover."

"Fair enough." I grin. "Jennifer Howe-Schmidt. Has a nice ring to it."

She's about to say something else when Maya appears at her elbow, eyes still red from crying, holding a plate of cake. "Okay, you two, enough being disgustingly cute. There's cake, and I'm not eating it alone."

Jennifer rolls her eyes, but she's smiling. "Fine. But you're dancing with me later."

"Obviously. I have to make sure you remember how to have fun without your husband hovering."

"He doesn't hover."

"He absolutely hovers. It's adorable. I'm going to tease him about it for the rest of his life."

Jennifer squeezes my hand and follows Maya toward the cake table, leaving me standing alone on the dance floor, watching her walk away. She glances back over her shoulder, catches my eye, and smiles—that smile—and I feel it in my chest, warm and bright and so full of love I think I might burst.

Marcus appears beside me, a glass of whiskey in each hand. He hands me one.

"You did good, kid," he says, and his voice is gruff but his eyes are suspiciously bright. "Real good."

I take the whiskey. "I had help."

"You did." He clinks his glass against mine. "And you're going to need more of it. That baby's going to be trouble."

"She's going to be perfect."

"Trouble and perfect. Same thing." He takes a sip of his whiskey, watching Jennifer across the room. "Maya's already talking about being the favorite aunt. I told her she's going to have to get in line behind me."

"You're not her uncle."

"I'm going to be. I've already decided." He looks at me, and there's something serious in his eyes beneath the gruff exterior. "I never had a son, Patrick. I've got a daughter who's the light of my life, and I wouldn't trade her for anything. But I never had a son. And then you showed up, this kid who'd given up on himself, and I thought—" He stops, clears his throat. "I thought, someone's got to show this kid he's worth something."

I don't know what to say. My throat is closed up again, and my eyes are burning, and I have to look away before I start crying in front of all these people.

"You showed me," I manage. "You and Jennifer. You both showed me."

Marcus claps me on the shoulder, his grip heavy and warm. "You showed yourself, kid. I just pointed you in the right direction."

He walks off toward Maya, leaving me alone with my whiskey and my thoughts. I watch him go, this man who took one look at me—in Jennifer's body, no less—and decided I was worth saving. I watch Maya laughing with Jennifer, the two of them bent over the cake table, stealing frosting with their fingers like they're still teenagers. I watch the people who came to celebrate us, to witness our love, to share in this moment I never thought I'd have.

And I think about the woman I just married. The woman who's carrying my child. The woman who saw me when I couldn't see myself, who loved me when I couldn't love myself, who made me believe that I deserved a happy ending after all.

I think about the vow I made to her, standing at that altar. To make her fall in love with me every single day. To be the man she saw when I couldn't see myself. To hold her hand in the dark and dance with her in the kitchen and read every book she writes before anyone else gets to.

I meant every word.

And I'm going to spend the rest of my life proving it.

Jennifer catches my eye across the room. She's holding a piece of cake, and she's laughing at something Maya said, but she's looking at me. Just me.

She raises her fork in a toast, and I raise my glass, and I know—I know—that this is it. This is the life I never thought I'd have. This is the love I never thought I'd find.

This is our story.

And it's only just beginning.