I'd said yes before he finished asking.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached past the jewelry box to the back of the drawer.
Velvet under my fingertips.
The ring box was smaller than I remembered. Navy blue, slightly worn at the corners.
I opened it.
The diamond caught the light. Small but clear. The band still bright, untouched by eight years in the dark.
He'd never asked for it back. In all the silence between us, the unanswered letters, the years of nothing, he'd never once asked me to return it.
Maybe he'd written it off. Maybe he'd forgotten.
Or maybe, like me, he couldn't bring himself to make it that final.
I closed the box. Set it on the dresser where I could see it.
I knew what to do with it now.
He knocked at six-fifty. Ten minutes early.
I opened the door.
Sunflowers in his hand. Button-down in pale blue, sleeves rolled to his elbows, dark jeans that fit him perfectly. That devastating half-smile that had undone me when I was twenty-two and still undid me now.
I stopped breathing.
"You remembered."
"I remember everything." He closed the distance between us, one hand sliding to the small of my back, and kissed me. Soft. Unhurried. Like we had all the time in the world.
When he pulled back, his eyes moved over my face. "You look beautiful."
I took the sunflowers. Breathed them in. After eight years, he'd remembered that I thought roses were cliché and sunflowers were hope.
"You look—" I shook my head. "You look like every dream I was afraid to have."
He laughed. Low, warm, the sound settling somewhere beneath my ribs. "Ready?"
"Let me put these in water."
I found a glass, I didn't own a vase, which said something about the state of my life, and set the sunflowers on the counter. Their bright yellow faces leaned toward the window.
When I turned back, Garrett was watching me from the doorway with an expression that made my chest ache.
"What?"
"Nothing." But it wasn't nothing. The same look he'd had on the rooftop the night he proposed. The look that saidI can't believe you're real.
He took my hand. Led me out.
The restaurant was a fifteen-minute walk. He'd chosen somewhere on foot, which meant night air and his arm against mine and the kind of city wandering we used to do before everything fell apart.
I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it. The rhythm of walking beside him, our strides falling into sync without either of us trying.
The place was everything I would have chosen. Warm lighting. Exposed brick. Intimate tables tucked into corners. The kind of place that felt like a secret.
