He gave me another smile and draped his arm over the back of my seat, running his finger tips up and down my arm.
“Emily.” Alice tugged at my sleeve. “Emily, do you think they have ice cream here?”
“I’m sure they do.”
“Can I have some?”
“Maybe in a bit.”
“But what if they run out?”
“They won’t run out.”
“But what if they DO?”
I bit back a smile. “Then we’ll find you something else equally delicious. I promise.”
She considered this, her little face scrunched in thought. “Okay. But I’m going to be very sad if they run out.”
“Noted.”
Cam checked his phone. Then his watch. Then his phone again.
That had me frowning again. “Are you expecting a call or something?”
“No.” He shoved the phone back in his pocket. “Just... no. Everything’s fine.”
Audrey looked up from her notebook, exchanged a glance with Alice, then went back to her scorekeeping with suspicious intensity.
Weird. But okay.
The innings rolled by. The Knights were now up by four, the crowd was happy, and Alice had graduated from ice cream concerns to giving me a very detailed account of a dream involving a purple dinosaur and a swimming pool full of jelly beans.
“And I could only pick ONE jelly bean, Emily. One. And I didn’t know which one to choose because what if I picked wrong and the dinosaur got mad at me?”
“That does sound stressful.”
“It was VERY stressful.” She threw her hands up for emphasis. “I woke up before I could even pick one.”
“A cliffhanger. The worst kind of dream.”
“I KNOW.”
I was about to ask what flavor she would have picked if she’d had more time when I noticed the crowd noise shifting.
It happened gradually at first. The cheering faded. Conversations dropped to murmurs, then to whispers, then to something that felt almost like held breath.
I looked around, confused. People were turning in their seats, craning their necks, their gazes all drifting upward toward the jumbotron.
My stomach did a strange little flip. I followed their eyes.
And there I was.
My own face, twenty feet tall, Alice beside me, mid-gesture, still telling me her dinosaur story.
Below the image, in massive white letters against a red background:
EMILY, WILL YOU MARRY ME?
