"Then follow me here." He held the box a little closer. "Marry me. Be mine. Let me be yours. Let me figure out the rest of it, alongside you."
I looked at the ring.
I thought about the locked doors. The ones that had been locked my whole life—the financial aid forms, the UT scholarship, the hotel showers I hadn't known how to work, the cabs I'd never flagged. I thought about the ones that had started to open—Luis's schedule, Wren Calloway's podcast, Lexi's idea that she still hadn't fully told me but that I trusted was real. I thought about Clayton's apology at the Battery and a song I'd written about a road I hadn't known was there.
I thought about his hands in a Marfa memory care facility, finding my harmony without being asked.
"Yes," I said.
He put the ring on my finger.
It fit.
Of course, it fit. He was Tommy Dane. He'd measured things without me knowing and planned things without announcing them and shown up with exactly what was needed in exactly the right moment since the first afternoon he'd walked across a restaurant with a guitar string in his pocket.
He kissed me in the West Texas light with the enormous sky going orange around us.
I kissed him back.
Outside, a hawk rode the updraft off the desert floor, slow and unhurried, and the horizon went pink at the edges, andsomewhere back in Marfa a woman with a quilt on her bed and seven boys on her dresser was sleeping peacefully with a song still in her chest.
On the plane home, I told him about Gatlinburg.
"I was going to go back this summer," I said. "That was the plan. Follow the season. Work the tourist strip, save money, go wherever came next."
He looked at me.
"And now?" he said.
"And now, I have a Carolinian gig schedule and a podcast episode to record and a ring on my finger." I paused. "I think I'll stay in Charleston."
"Yeah?"
"You're there," I said. "The Dominion Hall work—the brothers, Craine, all of it. You're staying."
He nodded. "My unit’s agreed to a new arrangement. Unofficial. It lets me work with my brothers without getting in trouble with the brass, which my commanding officer seemed relieved about."
"Does it feel like the right thing?"
"It feels like the only thing," he said. "My family's there. You're there." He looked at me. "That's what home means, now."
I looked at the ring.
"I'm going to need you to take me to Key West," I said. "When things quiet down a little. I want to show you the water I cried at. I want to stand on the beach with you and see it properly."
"Done," he said.
"And Tennessee," I said. "My people. My mama, my daddy, my siblings. Clayton." I paused. "You're going to love my mama."
"She makes the jam," he said. "I already love her."
I laughed.
He took my hand.
Outside the window, the desert had gone dark below us and the stars were coming out over West Texas, the kind of stars Tommy had described—thick and stacked and enormous, the kind you only saw when there was nothing between you and them.
"Tommy," I said.
