She stopped.
I looked at her across the empty living room. She had her arms still crossed over her chest, her chin up, braced forwhatever I was going to say. Twenty-three years of knowing her, and she still thought she had to brace for me. That landed somewhere uncomfortable.
I thought about what I wanted to say and how to say it in a way she would hear, because Ellie had a way of processing things through a filter that was not always kind to her, and I needed to get through the filter.
“Gus manipulated us,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He faked a deathbed and recruited a doctor and manufactured a dying wish to get us to the altar.”
“Yes.”
“That’s—” I considered the right word. “That is extremely Gus.”
That startled her face out of its careful arrangement.
“I’m not dismissing it,” I said. “It’s a lot. It’s genuinely a lot, and we’re going to have to figure out what to do with it, and yes, the man possibly deserves to be grounded for the rest of his natural life, which given the stroke situation we now understand is probably longer than we thought.” I crossed the room toward her, and she held her ground the way she always did, chin up. “But I need you to hear something before you apologize to me one more time.”
She looked at me.
“I’m in love with you,” I said. “Not because of the plan, not because of the license, not because Gus decided it was time and took matters into his own hands. Those things happened, and I’m not sorry they happened, but they’re not the reason.” I stopped in front of her, close enough to see the exact moment she stopped bracing. “I bought that ring four years ago. I’ve been showing up for twenty-three years. I meant every word I said in that hospital room, and it had nothing to do with the audience.” I held her gaze. “Gus was right. He’s been right for ten years. It’sa genuine pisser that he knew before I did, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.”
She didn’t move.
“I don’t want the annulment,” I said. “I want to stay married. I want this. The house and the cat and the Sunday dinners and your tea situation taking up half the counter and Gus being insufferable about grandchildren, which, by the way, is coming. We should prepare ourselves.” The corner of her mouth twitched the barest hint. “I want all of it. With you. Because you’re my best friend, and I’m in love with you, and those two things turn out to be the same thing. Your grandfather has been saying so for a decade, and I’m done arguing with him.”
Ellie looked at me for a long moment. Her chin was doing the thing, the almost imperceptible tightening, and her eyes were bright.
“He is going to be insufferable about this,” she said.
“Completely insufferable,” I agreed. “For the rest of his apparently going to be much longer life.”
“We should absolutely ground him.”
“No question. No pudding cups for a week.”
“He’ll just win them back from Sandra.”
“Probably,” I said. “Are you going to keep apologizing to me?”
She looked at me for another moment. Then she shook her head.
“Good,” I said, and closed the remaining distance between us, and kissed her, and this time there was no Gus in the next room, no squirrel on the roof, no interrupted continuation. Just the two of us in the quiet of an empty apartment, finally, with nowhere else to be.
NINETEEN
ELLIE
He kissed me like he had all the time in the world. I kissed him back like I was making up for lost time, which I supposed I was. Maybe not the full twenty-three years of it, but long enough that I was done waiting.
Thank God.
The thought arrived without ceremony or any of the careful reasoning I’d applied to every single development over the past several weeks. No analysis. No second-guessing. Just that. Thank God.
His hands came up to frame my face, thumbs tracing along my jaw, and the last of the tension I’d been carrying since I found out about Grandpa dissolved out of my shoulders. I’d spent hours rehearsing apologies, cataloguing damage, preparing for the look on Daniel’s face when he realized what my grandfather had put us through. I had not once let myself think about this. About wanting it. About him wanting it, too.
I’d been extremely stupid.
