“The soups were mixed in with the beans, Daniel, it was a whole thing?—”
“Ellie.”
I turned around.
He was leaning in the pantry doorway with his arms crossed and his gear bag still over one shoulder and the look of a man who’d known me since the third grade and was not going to pretend to believe I’d developed an urgent interest in pantry organization.
I looked at him for a moment.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re reorganizing the canned goods.”
“People do that.”
“You don’t. You barely look at them when you’re cooking. You just grab whatever’s in front.” He set the gear bag down without looking away from me. “You’ve been thinking.”
“I think all the time.”
“You’ve been panicking,” he said. “Which is different.”
I opened my mouth.
“Ellie.” Not sharp, not frustrated. Steady, the way he always was, the way that always made me feel simultaneously anchored and slightly unraveled. “Come out of the pantry.”
I came out of the pantry.
He waited until I’d set down the can of chickpeas I’d apparently been holding. “I don’t regret it.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“Daniel—”
“I need you to hear that first before we have whatever conversation you’ve been rehearsing in your head for the last three days.” He uncrossed his arms. “I don’t regret it. Not any of it. Not the plan, not the ring, not the license, not the morning.” He said the last word without flinching, which was more than I could say for myself. “None of it.”
I looked at him. He looked back.
“We said we’d figure it out later,” he said. “It’s later.”
“That’s—” I stopped. “That’s not what later meant.”
“What did it mean?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Or there were too many and couldn’t order them, couldn’t find the thread that would let me say any of it in a way that didn’t expose everything I’d been trying to keep filed away since the hospital room. Since before the hospital room. Since the cafeteria in third grade, maybe, if I was going to be completely honest, which I was not going to be, not standing in this kitchen with him looking at me like that.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said. Which was the truest thing I could offer.
“Do what?”
“This.” I gestured between us. “Be this. With you. And also still be—“ I stopped again. “What if we ruin it?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he took one step toward me, and another, and I held my ground because I was not a woman who retreated from things even when every nerve ending I possessed was suggesting it strongly. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin up to keep looking at him.
“What if we don’t?” he said.
That was all. Just that, offered with the same easy certainty he’d always had, the certainty that had always made impossible things feel possible, and I thought about the ring on my finger and the vows I’d meant more than I’d intended to and the morning and his hands and the fact that I did not want to go back, and I ran out of arguments.
He kissed me.
