He blinked like I’d spoken another language myself.
“She’s about as French as fried chicken,” he said.
“And yet.” I raised both brows.
He let that sit for a second, then shook his head. “So you’re tellin’ me,” he said, softly now, “you came all the way to Carsondale, Colorado… and you don’t even have a fiancé?”
“It’s a tragedy,” I said, trying to sound dry. It came out a little breathless.
And then…
He did it.
“Oh, marry me, Caroline,” he said, blurting it like it had been bouncing around inside him for days. The raw, earnest truth of the question pulled at my navel. It wasn’t a performance. He didn’t angle his voice for the listening crowd. The question was for me alone.
“I can’t make you the wife of the richest man in town. But I can make you the wife of the happiest.”
I did not speak.
Mostly because I couldn’t remember how.
He looked at me like he meant it.
“I figure we could use a trained nurse here,” he added quickly,like that might tip the scale. “Or, if you didn’t want to work, you wouldn’t have to.”
I saw the life he was offering, whole and tender and unplanned.
Slow Sundays and loud kitchens. Freddie growing tall and bossy. Lawbooks open on the table, buttered biscuits cooling beside them. Lessie visiting with new recipes and laughter that spilled into the hall. The hound we hadn’t named yet. The little porch. The windows that steamed in winter.
It was—absurdly, achingly—perfect.
In New Orleans, marriage had been a gilded cage: you married the lightest man you could manage, roamed your three tidy blocks of the French Quarter, curtsied to your neighbors, repeated your schedule until death or scandal pried it open. Safety was thewholepoint. The sameness was the prize.
And I had told myself I wanted that.
But what Major was offering felt like something else entirely.
It felt like freedom.
“Caroline?” he said again, softer now. The crack in it undid me.
“Oh my goodness,” I said, blinking at him, stunned at myself. “I thought I said yes already.”
He laughed then, and Freddie caught and pulled a frizzy curl of my hair, tilting my face up toward Major.
And because I couldn’t help myself, because I loved knowing things before other people did, I said, “By the way… Lessie is L. Mae.”
He froze.
“You don’t have to go looking for her,” I added, grinning now. “She’s been with us the whole time.”
It took a second. Then—
“That—” he started, but I was already laughing. It was too good.
I reached for the folded ticket half hanging from his vest pocket.
I took it.
