Delilah and Levi. I’d know them anywhere.
Delilah’s become one of my closest friends over the past year, bonding over book club wine and shared stories of romantic disasters. Hers had a happy ending, though. Levi came back, she stayed, and the whole town has been waiting for exactly what I think is about to happen.
They stop at the end of the pier, right where the wood meets the water and the sky spreads out inoranges and pinks and the kind of purple that doesn’t seem real.
“They’re just standing there,” Aidan reports, because he’s appointed himself Pier Correspondent. “Looking at each other. Being weird.”
“They’re not being weird,” Millie says. “They’re being romantic.”
“Same thing.”
I should look away. This feels private, whatever’s about to happen. But I can’t stop watching, and apparently neither can my children, because even Jenna has pulled out one earbud and is watching with poorly disguised interest.
He says something to her. She laughs again, shaking her head, and then he reaches into his jacket pocket.
Oh.
Oh no.
He pulls out a small box. Gets down on one knee.
“Mom,” Millie breathes. “Is he...”
“Shh.”
I can’t hear what he’s saying. We’re too far away for words. But I can see her face, the way her hands fly up to cover her mouth, the way her whole body goes still and then startsshaking.
He opens the box.
She nods. Once, twice, a dozen times, nodding so hard it’s a wonder her head doesn’t fall off.
He stands, slides the ring on her finger, and then she’s in his arms and he’s lifting her off the ground and spinning her, and she’s laughing and crying and the sunset is painting them gold and this is everything.
“She said yes!” Aidan announces at full volume. “The lady said yes!”
I clap a hand over his mouth, but it’s too late. They’ve heard. Delilah looks over, still crying, still laughing, and her face lights up when she sees me.
“Emma!” She’s waving her hand, the ring catching the light. “Did you see? Did yousee?”
“I saw!” I’m laughing now too, because her joy is contagious. “Congratulations!”
She grabs Levi’s hand and drags him toward us, practically skipping. This is the Delilah I’ve come to know over the past year of book club meetings and coffee dates and late-night texts about our respective romantic disasters. Except hers isn’t a disaster anymore. Hers is a fairy tale.
“He asked me to marry him,” she says, like I might have missed it. “Right here. On our pier.”
“I was going to do it at the restaurant.” Levi wraps his arm around her, grinning. “Had a whole plan. Reservations. Champagne. But then I realized this is our spot. This pier. This is where it all started.”
“When we were seventeen,” Delilah adds, squeezing his hand. “He kissed me right here when we were seventeen.”
My heart squeezes watching them. Seventeen. I know this story by heart now, after a year of book club meetings. The summer they met as teenagers. The kiss on this very pier. The decade apart, then finding each other again at twenty-seven, only to lose each other a second time. His fame, her running, the way she almost left town for good six months ago until he chased her all the way to Asheville.
Twenty years of almost and not-quite, and now this.
That’s the kind of love story I used to think only existed in books. The kind I definitely don’t believe in anymore, after a ten-year marriage that ended with “I just don’t feel the same way anymore” and a house I had to sell and a life I had to rebuild from scratch.
But watching them, the way theylook at each other like no one else exists, the way she keeps touching the ring like she can’t believe it’s real...
Maybe Delilah’s proof that second chances are real. Even if I’m not sure I’ll ever get one myself.
