He notices.
“This is not pressure,” he says quickly. “You already said yes. This is just…a shiny object to make it official when you feel like wearing it.”
He flips the box open.
The ring is simple. A thin band, warm gold, with a small, round diamond in the center and two tiny emeralds on either side.
“Oh,” I breathe.
“If you hate it, we can change it,” he rushes on. “I didn’t want anything too big—knew you’d never wear it if it got caught in your hair every five seconds. But I wanted something that looked like you. Clean. Sharp. Different.”
My eyes burn.
“It’s perfect,” I say. “You absolute sap.”
He laughs, relief loosening his shoulders.
“May I?” he asks, suddenly shy.
I hold out my left hand.
He slides the ring on.
It fits like it was always meant to be there.
My brain does a funny, skipping record thing, trying to overlay old scripts on this moment—my father’s list of acceptable matches, society columns, staged photos.
None of them stick.
This is just a porch, some snow, a man with bruised knuckles and soft eyes putting a ring on my finger because I said yes in a hospital bed with my hair a mess and a blood pressure cuff on my arm.
He kisses me. It’s not a first kiss, or a desperate one. It’s steady. Certain.
Anof coursekind of kiss.
When we break apart, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out.
Jack: Got news. Henry didn’t hit Richmond. But he left a new present. We’ll talk tomorrow. Enjoy your evening.
Jack: And tell Santa congrats on the upgrade from contract elf-sitting to permanent fiancé.
My eyebrows climb.
“Jack says hi,” I tell Bran. “And he already knows about the ring.”
“Of course he does,” Bran mutters.
I tuck the phone away.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about Henry’s “present.” We’ll look at photos, trace lines on maps, argue over patterns.
Tomorrow, the story keeps going.
Today, I stand on Cotton’s back porch in a sweater that doesn’t belong to me, with a ring on my finger and a man at my back and a family that accidentally adopted me.
For a girl who spent most of her life being decoration in someone else’s narrative, it feels a little like theft.
