“You are never only making an observation. Not once in your entire life have you just made an observation.”
I stayed quiet. I didn’t even want to know who’d made it onto his radar as a suitable candidate, partly because I’d have to hear about it for the foreseeable future, and partly because I had lost track of how many people he’d decided needed to be paired off since he’d successfully navigated us to the altar.
“It’s what I do,” he said, with the serenity of a man completely at peace with himself and his methods. He folded his hands over his stomach. “Anyway. Speaking of the holidays. Christmas.” He said it as a statement rather than a question—the way he said most things he’d already decided. “I was thinking this year we do it properly. Here, at the house, now that I’m back on my feet. Tree, the whole business. Proper Christmas.”
Ellie frowned. “We always do Christmas at your house. Why would this year be any different?”
He looked directly at the camera. “I was thinking it would be a fine time for some kind of announcement.”
Ellie went very still beside me. “What kind of announcement?”
“The kind,” Gus said simply, with great dignity, “that a man waits for. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.”
“Grandpa. We’ve been married for two months.”
“Your grandmother and I didn’t waste any time,” he said, as though this settled it.
“You and Grandma were twenty-two.”
“People mature at different rates.” He appeared to consider this a complete and airtight argument and had no interest in entertaining any counter-evidence. “I’m just saying Christmas would be a lovely time for news. That’s all. I’m not pushing.”
“You’re absolutely pushing,” I said. “With both hands and possibly a skid steer.”
“I’m expressing a preference,” he said. “There’s a meaningful distinction.” He smiled at us then, the wide, warm, entirely unrepentant beam that I had come to understand meant he was certain he was right and had no intention of pretending otherwise. “You two enjoy the snow. I’ll let you get back to whatever it is you were doing.”
“We were sleeping,” Ellie said.
“Of course you were,” he said pleasantly, and ended the call.
Ellie set the phone back on the nightstand and lay back to stare at the ceiling with the expression of a woman who knew she’d been outmaneuvered by a man with a video call, a Christmas timeline, and seventy years of accumulated tactical experience, and was working through her feelings about it.
“He’s never going to stop,” she said.
“He’s really not,” I agreed. “It’s not in him.”
“He faked a deathbed. It worked. And now he thinks he can just aim that same energy at whatever he decides needs sorting.” She paused. “Which, apparently, is now us. Again. Even though he literally just sorted us.”
“He’s not wrong that it worked,” I said.
She turned her head to look at me. Outside, somewhere in the pines, a small accumulated weight of snow gave way and slid from a branch, and the tree bounced gently back, lighter and unburdened. “No,” she said. “He’s not wrong. Annoyingly.”
“Christmas is three weeks away,” I said, keeping my voice very even.
“I am aware of when Christmas is, Daniel.”
“I’m just noting the timeline. As an observation.”
She studied me for a moment, reading my face the way she’d been reading it since we were eight years old. Something shifted in her expression then. The small, private softness that wasn’t for anyone else in the world, that had always been just for me even before either of us had known what to call it.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I’m saying,” I said, “that we’ve been married for two months, and we’re on our honeymoon, and it is snowing outside. Gus is going to be insufferable about this regardless of whether we give him anything concrete to be insufferable about.” I turned onto my side to face her properly. “And I’m saying that I am wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, in favor of the general project, whenever it happens to happen, if you are.”
She held my gaze for a long moment. Long enough that I could hear the quiet of the cabin around us, and the soft, distant sound of snow falling through pine branches outside. “We’re on vacation.”
“We are.”
“We have nowhere to be until Friday.”
