"That I can do."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He pulled her close, her shoes bumping against his leg. "I'm good at telling people when they're being idiots."
"I've noticed."
The cottage came into view around the bend, the string lights casting their warm glow across the porch. The boxes were still stacked by the door, waiting to be unpacked. The bookshelves were still empty, waiting to be filled.
Tomorrow, they'd unpack the rest of her things. Put his father's books on a shelf where he could see them. Figure out where the coffee maker should go and whose towels would hang in the bathroom, and all the small negotiations of two lives becoming one.
But tonight, they just walked up the porch steps together, the sand still clinging to their shoes, the sound of the waves fading behind them.
Lila unlocked the door with her key. Her key. Still strange, still new.
"Home," she said.
Ronan followed her inside and closed the door behind them.
Chapter Nineteen
Lila had never bought a Christmas tree with someone else before.
She'd grown up with the trees her parents picked out together—her father insisting on the tallest one they could fit through the door, her mother rolling her eyes and measuring the ceiling with a practiced glance. After they were gone, she'd stopped bothering. A small artificial tree from the attic, pre-lit and convenient, was set up in the corner of her living room, where she barely looked at it.
But Ronan had mentioned, casually, that he'd never had a real tree. Not as a kid, not in the military, not in the years of moving from one temporary assignment to another. And something about the way he said it—like it was just a fact, nothing to feel sorry about—made her want to change it.
So here they were, at the tree lot on the edge of town, surrounded by Frasier firs and Douglas spruces and families with small children running between the rows.
"This one's too tall," Ronan said, examining a tree that was easily eight feet tall.
"The cottage ceilings are nine feet."
"We don't have a ladder."
"Sid has a ladder."
"Sid has opinions about ladders. And tree placement. And the proper ratio of lights to branches." Ronan moved to the next tree in the row. "I'm starting to think Sid has opinions about everything."
"He does. That's part of his charm." Lila stopped in front of a smaller tree, maybe six feet, with full branches and a slight lean to the left. "What about this one?"
Ronan circled it slowly, examining it from all angles as if he were assessing a tactical position. "It's crooked."
"It has character."
"It's going to fall over."
"Not if we put it in the corner. The wall will hold it up."
He looked at her. Then at the tree. Then back at her.
"You've already decided."
"I decided the second I saw it. I was just being polite by pretending to consider other options."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "That's not how decisions are supposed to work."
"That's exactly how decisions work. You know what you want. You pretend to weigh the alternatives. You do what you were always going to do." She patted the crooked tree's trunk. "This is our tree. Accept it."
