“And Soren's good people.” He glanced over at where Soren was laughing at something Poppy had said, his whole face open in a way he used to guard so carefully. “You hold onto him.”
“That's the plan.”
People started trickling out around ten. Hugs at the door, promises to do this again soon, Finn carrying an exhausted Jamie to the car while his grandfather followed behind. The team left in a cluster, still arguing about something hockey-related. Soren's siblings headed upstairs — my parents had offered to stay the night and take the guest rooms with the kids, and the offer had been accepted in the easy way of people who trusted where they were.
And then it was just us.
Soren was cleaning up, loading the dishwasher with the mechanical focus of a man whose brain was somewhere else entirely.
I walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, pulling him back against my chest.
“Leave it,” I said. “We can deal with it tomorrow.”
“There's like forty dishes.”
“I don't care about the dishes.” I turned him around to face me. “Come here.”
I led him out to the deck overlooking the ocean. The stars were out, bright against the black sky, and the sound of the waves was loud enough to drown out everything else. We stood at the railing for a minute, just breathing in the salt air, and he leaned his forearms on the wood and looked out at the water.
After a while he turned to look at me, and his face had settled into something steadier. Not resolved. Not at peace with any of it. But upright, which was the thing that mattered.
“Thank you,” he said. “For sitting with me in there.”
“I'll always sit with you.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then something in his expression shifted, softened, went somewhere past the hard day and the letter and everything the evening had carried.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He smiled, small and real. “Just you.”
I held his gaze. And I thought about the ring that had been sitting in my jacket pocket for three weeks, waiting for the right moment, and I thought about how there was no such thing as the right moment — there was only the moment you were in and the person you were in it with.
Fuck it. Just say it.
“I've been thinking,” I started, and Soren turned to look at me with a slightly wary expression.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Probably.” I took his hands and laced our fingers together. “I've been thinking about the fact that we've known each other most of our lives. That we lost over a decade because life was a disaster and neither of us knew how to fix it. That we got a second chance most people don't get, and I don't want to waste any more time.”
“Rook—”
“Let me finish.” I squeezed his hands. “Coming home to you, waking up next to you, having you in my space and in my life — it's everything I didn't know I needed. And I don't want it to be temporary. I don't want it to be a trial period or something we're testing out. I want it to be permanent.”
I let go of his hands and reached into my pocket, pulling out the ring I'd been carrying for three weeks. Simple platinum band, no flashy stones, just solid and real and meant to last.
“Marry me,” I said. “Not because everything is perfect or because we've got it all figured out. But because I know who you are and I love every fucking part of it. Because I want you inevery version of my future. Because you're home, Soren. You've always been home.”
His eyes were shining in the starlight, and for a second he just stared at me like he couldn't quite process what was happening. Then his face crumpled and he laughed and it sounded like crying and joy all mixed together.
“You absolute bastard,” he said, his voice wrecked. “You're asking me to marry you on the deck of your ocean house under the stars after the hardest and best day of my life.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Of course it's a yes, you idiot.” He grabbed my face and kissed me hard enough that I stumbled backward into the railing. “Yes. A thousand times yes.”
I slipped the ring onto his finger and it fit perfectly, and when I looked up at him he was still crying and smiling and looking at me like I'd just handed him the world.
