The kitchen goes extremely quiet. Even the goat, somewhere out in the dark, appears to be waiting.
"What," she says.
"Oh, God." I put my hands over my face. "No.Not like that. That's not— that was not the plan."
"There was a plan?"
"There was anoutstandingplan, Iris. It had avenue—"
"You just proposed to me over tarte tatin."
"I'm aware of what I did."
"With no ring."
"I'maware—"
"While I was doing an impression of a man from Aix."
"You were doing it badly," I say, with enormous dignity, from behind my hands.
There's a long silence.
Then I feel her take hold of my wrists and pull my hands down off my face — and she's looking at me, and she isn't laughing, and her eyes are absolutely swimming.
"Say it again," she says.
"Iris—"
"Cat." Her voice cracks straight down the middle. "Say it again."
So I do.
I have spent my entire life leaving before anybody could leave me. I got very good at it. It's the single most reliable thing about me. I've run from jobs and cities and people, and once from a small stone farmhouse in Provence with a woman standing in the doorway of it calling my name.
And I sit in that woman's kitchen — my kitchen, our kitchen, my grandmother's kitchen — and I take both her hands, and I don't run.
"Marry me," I say. "I've got no ring. I've got no speech. I had a plan and I've just set fire to it. But I'm not going anywhere, Iris, and I want to say that out loud, in front of everyone we know — so that when I get frightened, and Iwillget frightened, I'll have told the entire village and I won't be able to weasel out of it."
Iris makes a sound that's half laugh, half sob.
"That," she says, "is the least romantic proposal I have ever heard in my life."
"Yes."
"It hasweasellingin it."
"It has weaselling in it. Yes."
"Cat." She's crying properly now, and grinning like an idiot. "It's perfect. Yes. God.Yes."
She's out of her chair and into my lap before I've fully registered it, and there is tarte tatin involved somewhere in the process, and neither of us cares in the slightest.
Much later — plates still on the table, candle burned down, Iris asleep against my shoulder on the sofa like something switched off at the wall — I sit in the dark of my grandmother's sitting room and look at the photograph on the mantel.
Two women. A village hall. Six people and a very poor cake.
They waited thirty-three years.
