"I want to be very clear about something, because I think it matters, and I think you've got it slightly wrong." Her thumb moves over my knuckles. "You didn't fix me."
I open my mouth.
"You didn't," she says. "I want that on the record, because one day somebody is going to ask us how this happened, and I don't want either of us telling it wrong. I fixed myself. I read my grandmother's letter, and I sat in a kitchen for three days being a coward, and then I walked down that hallway on my own two legs and knocked on a door. Nobody did that for me."
She's crying now, and appears entirely unbothered by it, which is new.
"But you werethere," she says. "That's the whole of it. Every single time I turned round — being difficult, and correcting my paperwork, and alphabetising things that do not want to be alphabetised, and not going anywhere. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped waiting to be left." She laughs, wetly. "I didn't even notice it happening. That's how you did it. You simply refused to leave until it stopped being remarkable."
"Cat."
"Nearly done." She reaches into her pocket. "I had a whole passage about the lavender. It was extremely moving. You'll never hear it."
And then she's on one knee — in a field my grandmother knelt in — holding up a ring. A thin gold band with a small violet stone that catches what's left of the light.
"Lavender amethyst," she says. "Sophie found it. She's been unbearable about it for a fortnight."
"Cat—"
"Iris Beaumont-Clark." Her voice finally goes. "I'm not going anywhere. Not tonight. And not on a wet Tuesday in February when there's nothing on and the pump's broken and we've run out of things to say to each other." She swallows hard. "I want the boring years. I want all of them. Will you marry me?"
"You already have a yes," I tell her. "You got one eleven days ago. You got itwith pastry."
"I'd like another."
"Greedy."
"Iris."
I get down into the dirt with her, because if she's going to ruin a decent pair of trousers then so am I.
"Yes," I say. "Yes. Obviously yes. Yes on the rise, and yes in the kitchen, and yes on the wet Tuesday in February when the pump's broken." I take her face in my hands. "Ask me every week for the rest of your life. The answer is not going to get any different."
She kisses me so hard we both go over sideways into the lavender.
The ring fits. Of course it fits.
When I ask how she got my size she says, "I have my methods." When I press her, she admits she measured my finger with a length of butcher's string while I was asleep — which is the singlemost alarming thing I have ever heard, and I fully intend to be furious about it at some later date.
We lie in the cut stalks until the light goes and the stars come out and it becomes genuinely, unpleasantly cold, and neither of us moves.
"We should go in," Cat says eventually.
"Probably."
Neither of us goes in.
Below us the farmhouse sits in the dark with one light burning in the kitchen — because I left it on, because I always leave it on now, because somebody taught me that you leave a light on for the person who's coming home.
"Cat."
"Mm."
"Can I read the index cards?"
"Absolutely not."
"You'll show me eventually."
