For years, love had been something that asked me to disappear in pieces.
This love handed me back to myself.
“So,” Finn said, voice low, “will you marry me?”
I looked at him.
At the man who had never once tried to make me smaller.
At the studio with my name on the door.
At the plans beneath my hand.
At the life I had built, line by line, even when my hands shook.
“Yes,” I whispered.
The tension left his shoulders in a rush. He let out a breath, his face breaking open into a grin that was all relief and disbelief and light.
“Yes.”
He slid the ring onto my finger, and I barely had time to look at it before I was in his arms, laughing and crying against his mouth while he kissed me like the answer had remade him.
Maybe it had.
Maybe love always remade people a little.
The right kind of love didn’t erase the person I’d been.
It just gave me more room to become the woman I was meant to be.
Later, after we called my mother and his sister and endured twenty full minutes of delighted screaming from relatives who’d clearly been waiting for this exact outcome, we sat on the floor of the studio with takeout containers between us and the approved permits spread across the drafting table above our heads.
My ring flashed every time I reached for noodles.
I kept staring at it.
Finn kept pretending not to notice.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“I’m allowed.”
“You are.”
“It’s pretty.”
“You’re pretty.”
“That was terrible.”
“It worked.”
“It absolutely did.”
He grinned and leaned back against the built-in shelves, legs stretched out, one hand resting loosely on my ankle.
I looked around the studio.
