Page 110 of Sexting My Ex’s Dad

“I did.”

“You absolute lunatic.”

I huff out a laugh. “I’ve been called worse.”

She laughs too, and now the tears are loose and real, sliding down her cheeks while she tries not to make a sound big enough to wake Ivy.

I shift forward as much as my ribs allow and hold the box out farther. “Athena.”

That does it.

She covers her face for a second, then drops her hands and looks at me with so much love in her face that it feels like being hit clean through the chest. “Yes,” she whispers.

I blink. “Yes?”

“Yes, Nathan,” she says, stronger now, smiling and crying at the same time. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Relief goes through me so hard I almost laugh like a fool. I take the ring out with fingers that are a little less steady than I’d prefer and hold my hand out for hers.

Athena gives it to me without hesitation.

I slide the ring onto her finger slowly, watching it settle there like it already belonged. She looks down at it then back at me, and there’s a kind of wonder in her face that I know I’ll want burned into memory for the rest of my life.

“You agreed to marry me,” I murmur, still a little stunned.

She lifts her left hand, turning it slightly so the stone catches the low hospital light. “Looks like it.”

I catch her wrist gently and press my mouth to her knuckles, right above the ring. From the recliner, Ivy makes a sleepy little sound and shifts without waking.

Athena and I both freeze, then look at her, then at each other.

Her smile turns helpless. “We just got engaged next to our sleeping daughter.”

I look at Ivy, at Athena, at the ring on her hand, and the full absurd tenderness of it nearly undoes me.

“Honestly,” I say, “that sounds exactly right.”

Athena leans in carefully and kisses me, soft and deep and laughing a little into my mouth. When she pulls back, she rests her forehead against mine and closes her eyes.

“Okay,” she whispers.

“Okay,” I echo.

And in the recliner beside us, Ivy sleeps through the moment that changes all of our lives.

By the end of the second week, I’m discharged.

I heal at Athena’s pace, which is to say I’m allowed to think I’m in charge as long as I continue doing exactly what she says. Daniel drops in often enough to remain insufferable, Maya appears whenever anyone needs backup, and somewhere in the middle of all that, our lives begin arranging themselves into something recognizably domestic.

I sign the lease on a short-term furnished place in Back Bay first, since it’s close enough to Beacon Harbor for follow-ups and close enough to Ivy’s new school not to make mornings absurd. Athena insists on seeing it before anything is final. We go together.

She stands in the living room with Ivy beside her, both of them turning slowly in a beam of afternoon light while I pretend not to care whether they like it.

“The kitchen is better,” Athena says.

“The kitchen is excellent,” I correct.

Ivy runs down the hall, opens a door, then runs back. “My room has a window seat.”