It was after ten now. Grandma went to bed an hour ago with a pointed “goodnight, sweetheart” that carried every opinion she’d held back all day. The house was dark, quiet, and I was on the couch staring at the ceiling with the porch light on and his car still visible through the curtain.
Twelve hours. He’d been out there for twelve hours.
I stood up, put on my jacket, opened the front door and walked onto the porch. He was out of the car before I reached the bottom step, crossing the street, and I held up my hand.
“Stop. Right there.”
He stopped on the sidewalk. He looked worse than this morning, clothes damp, hair flat against his forehead, dark circles so deep they looked like bruises.
“Go home, Finneas.”
“No.”
“I’m serious. Get in your car and go home.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“You’ve been sitting in a car for twelve hours. This is insane.”
“I’ll sit in it for twelve more. I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
I stared at him. He stared back. Rain was still dripping from the gutter between us, slow and rhythmic, and neither of us blinked.
“Fine.” I sat on the porch bench and crossed my arms. “You have until I decide you’re done.”
He walked to the bottom of the porch steps and sat on the lowest one, below me, looking up. I didn’t invite him higher.
“When you were in the hallway at the hospital,” he said, “waiting for me outside my mother’s room. She asked me to marry Lorraine.”
I went still. That night. I was sitting in a plastic chair staring at the door, worried sick about him, while Lorraine called me names and her mother smirked at me from across the hall. He was on the other side of that door and his mother was asking him to marry someone else.
“She was crying, begging, telling me it was her dying wish. That it was the last thing she talked about with my father before he died.” His hands were gripping each other between his knees. “I said yes. And then I walked out and told you to go home because I couldn’t look at you knowing what I’d just agreed to.”
That was why. That was why he wouldn’t meet my eyes, why he told me to leave, why he didn’t lean into the kiss. He’d already said yes.
“Without telling me. Without giving me a single goddamn word for three days while I was losing my mind.”
He didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
The anger surged so fast I had to grip the armrest to keep myself on the bench. But underneath it, in the part of me that lost both parents at fifteen and would have given anything for one more conversation with either of them, I understood the pull of a dying wish. If Grandma was in a hospital bed asking me for something with her last breath, could I say no? Could I look at the woman who raised me and tell her no while she was dying?
I didn’t know. I hated that I didn’t know.
“Why didn’t you at least tell me what was happening?” I asked. “Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”
“Because I was a coward. Because I thought I had to carry it alone. Every time I thought about calling you, I pictured your face, and I couldn’t...” He trailed off, staring at the porch step between his feet.
“You couldn’t what?”
“I couldn’t be the one to put that look on your face. The one where you realize I’m choosing someone else.”
“So instead you let me find out from Lorraine. With a magazine. You thought that was the better option?”
He closed his eyes. “No. That was worse. I didn’t know she was going to do that. She told me in the car on the way to the office, and by the time I got to the floor she was already handing it to you.”
“Oh, that’s great. So your future wife surprised you too. What a team you make.”
The sarcasm came out sharper than I intended but I didn’t take it back. He deserved sharp. He deserved every edge I had.
