"Good."
"You said two things."
"I did."
"What's the second."
He takes my hand. Walks me to the fireplace. Pulls me down onto the rug in front of it. Sits cross-legged. Pulls me into his lap.
"The second is a question. I'm not asking it yet. I'm telling you I'm going to ask it."
"Okay."
"Not tomorrow. Not next week. Probably not this year. When you're ready. When you trust it. When it's not going to land like a pressure on a woman who just moved her whole life for a man. But I want you to know I'm going to ask. So when I do, you're not surprised."
"Grayson."
"I'm going to ask you to marry me, Simone. At some point in the next however long. When it feels right. When you feel it in your chest and not your head. I just want you to know it's coming. Because I meant what I said on the sidewalk in Toronto. Home is wherever you take me next. And I want to spend the rest of my life being taken places by you."
I cry.
Not the ugly kind. The warm kind. The kind that just leaks out because a chest isn't big enough for a feeling.
I put my hand on his face.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay I will marry you. Ask whenever you want. The answer is already yes. The answer was yes on the porch. The answer was yes in the shack. The answer was probably yes when you told me to keep still and I did."
"Simone."
"I'm not joking."
"I know you're not."
"So ask me whenever."
"I'm still going to do it right."
"I know you are."
He leans up. Kisses me slow. The pendant sits cool between us.
Outside the wind moves through the pines.
Inside the fire catches and warms the room.
I sit in his lap on the rug in front of the fireplace in a cabin that is now my cabin, in a town I have never walked the streets of but already belong to, with a gold disc at my throat that says the one word I needed a man to say out loud before I could believe it.
"Home," I say. Just to say it.
"Yeah," he says back. "Home."
EPILOGUE
GRAYSON
