The door opened. The same man helped me back into my wheelchair and the Escalade pulled away from the curb and disappeared into traffic and I sat on the sidewalk outside my apartment building in the afternoon sun feeling something I hadn’t felt in months.
Purpose.
43
Mehar
The helicopter lifted off the pad behind the compound and my stomach dropped but I didn’t grab anything this time. Yesterday I was death-gripping a Cessna armrest and today I was sitting in a glass bubble with nothing between me and a thousand-foot canyon drop and I wasn’t scared. I was leaning forward with my face close to the window, watching Sedona open up beneath us like the earth had cracked itself open to show me what it was hiding underneath.
Red rock formations rose from the desert floor in shapes that didn’t look real. Towers and arches and layered cliffs striped in orange and rust and deep burgundy, carved by millions of years of wind and water into something that made everything humans built look temporary and small. The canyons were massive, deep cuts in the earth with shadows pooling at the bottom and sunlight hitting the upper walls in stripes of gold. I could see the river threading through the valley below, thin and silver, surrounded by green cottonwoods that looked like someone had painted them there.
“You good?” Quest asked through the headset.
“I’m better than good.” I couldn’t stop staring. I’d never seen anything like this. I grew up in Shamir Ali’s house where the view from my window was the side of another rowhouse. I lived with Ahmad in an apartment where the only landscape was a parking lot. My dungeon was in a basement. My world had always been walls and ceilings and locked doors and here I was flying over open canyons with no walls at all and it felt like my chest was expanding to match the space. I’d specifically requested a trip to Sedona because I wanted to see this place in person. And it was more beautiful than I could even imagine.
Quest pointed out Cathedral Rock and Bell Rock and the Chapel of the Holy Cross built into the side of a cliff and I realized this man had studied this place before bringing me here. He didn’t just rent a compound and fly me out. He learned the geography so he could narrate it for me. That was Quest. He did nothing halfway.
We landed back at the compound around noon. Quest disappeared into his office for a call and told me to go enjoy myself. An hour later I understood what he meant. A massage therapist and a makeup artist were waiting for me in the master suite. They’d set up a full station with a portable massage table, a ring light, brushes, palettes, and a steamer for my skin. He’d flown them in from Scottsdale.
The massage was ninety minutes of someone putting my body back together one knot at a time. The makeup artist was a Black woman named Toni who had worked with Rihanna’s team and understood brown skin without me having to explain what undertones I needed. She spent an hour on my face and when she turned the mirror around I looked at myself and didn’t recognize the woman staring back. Not because I looked different. Because I looked like the version of myself I’d always been but had never been allowed to be. Beautiful without performance. Feminine without submission.
The dress was laid out on the bed. Pink, tight, Roberto Cavalli with ostrich feathers cascading from the hem. When I put it on and looked in the full-length mirror I understood that Quest had picked this dress for me because he’d picked this color for me since the beginning. Peach. Pink. The warm spectrum that he associated with the woman who softened every hard edge of his life.
I walked out onto the deck and Quest was standing at the railing in a black suit with no tie, his top button undone, looking out at the canyon with a glass of champagne in his hand. He turned when he heard my heels on the stone and his face did something I’d never seen before. His mouth opened slightly and his eyes moved from my face to my feet and back up and he didn’t say anything for about five seconds. He was never speechless. This was a first.
“Say something,” I said.
“I can’t. You broke my brain.”
I laughed and walked toward him and he met me halfway and put his free hand on my waist and kissed my forehead because he didn’t want to mess up my makeup and that small act of consideration after everything this man had done with those same hands was the most tender thing I’d ever experienced.
Dinner was set up at the edge of the deck overlooking the valley. A table for two with white linen and candles and pink roses and the Sedona sunset turning the sky behind it into layers of color that no filter could replicate. Pink and purple and deep orange bleeding into each other while the red rocks below went from gold to copper to shadow.
We ate lobster tail and filet mignon with lobster mashed potatoes and sautéed asparagus and drank champagne that definitely cost more than my first car. But the food wasn’t the point. The point was Quest sitting across from me in the fading light, looking at me over his glass with an expression that hadnothing to do with hunger and everything to do with certainty. He was sure about me. He’d been sure about me since he slid that garter up my thigh. And tonight he was going to say it out loud.
We finished dinner and the server cleared the table and the sun was almost gone, just a thin line of orange on the horizon, and the first stars were coming through and Quest stood up and walked around to my side of the table.
He crouched beside me. One hand on the back of my chair, his face level with mine, those dark eyes steady and stripped of every layer of armor he’d worn for thirty-eight years. He was just a man looking at a woman he’d chosen.
“From the moment you came into my life there ain’t been shit but chaos.”
I let out a giggle, because he was right.
“And that chaos has lit me up in ways I never knew I needed. You keep me on my toes. You make me feel alive. You’ve given me something I didn’t believe existed.”
He opened the box. The ring caught the last of the sunset light and fractured it into a hundred tiny fires. A seven-carat oval diamond on a platinum band that was so beautiful it hurt to look at and so specific to me that I knew he’d designed it himself.
“Marry me, Mehar. Not just because I need you. Because I chose you. And I’ll choose you every day for the rest of my life.”
My hands were shaking. My eyes were full. My heart was beating so fast I could hear it in my ears. I looked at this man crouched in front of me on a deck in Sedona with the desert behind him and a ring in his hand and I thought about every door I’d walked through to get here. Every door led to this one. And this was the first one I was walking through because I wanted to, not because I had to.
“Yes,” I said.
He slid the ring onto my finger and I looked down at it and the diamond was so clear I could see the candlelight reflected inside it and on the inside of the band, engraved in tiny letters, was one word:Peach.
I grabbed his face and kissed him and he lifted me out of the chair and held me against him and somewhere behind us I heard the soft click of a camera. He’d hired a photographer. He’d planned every detail of this night, leaving nothing to chance. No one had ever done anything like this for me.
We stood there holding each other while the sky went dark and the stars filled in and the photographer captured it all from a respectful distance and when Quest finally pulled back and looked at me he was smiling with his whole face. Not the business smile or the charming smile or the dangerous smile. The real one. The one that only existed for me.
