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Maybe he won’t do what I’ve thought he’d do.

Maybe I’ve been using a request from over twenty years ago as an excuse to keep hiding.

I set my drink down.

“I’m going to head back,” I say.

Mik looks up. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Just tired. It’s been a long day. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Bastian nods absently.

Nikko and Stone are somewhere on the dancefloor or at the bar, so I send my brother a text and head to the club door.

Outside, the cold slaps me in the face.

I hail a cab and give the driver the name of the hotel, but when we get there, I’m not in the mood to be indoors again. I pay the driver and tip generously. I greet the hotel doorman but keep walking past the doors.

I don’t have a destination. My head is too loud, the hotel room would be too quiet, and I need to move.

I walk wherever my feet take me, lost in my thoughts.

Bastian is willing to fight for it.

That’s the thing I can’t stop hearing.

Bastian is willing to fight for it.

I turn onto another street. A jewelry store sits on the corner, closed for the night, but its window display is still lit. The display is missing expensive items like large diamonds and rare watches, their little velvet stands empty.

But there’s a section of the display that’s just rings. Not engagement rings, exactly. Some of them are, but a lot of them are just simple gold or silver bands.

My eyes narrow on one with a hammered texture that catches the light, with a single thin line of black inlay running around the middle.

I stand in front of the window with my hands in my coat pockets, my brain on overdrive, and my heart pounding.

Would I marry Griffin Hall?

For ten years, it’s been a question I’ve never allowed to enter even my deepest thoughts. It’s a too-big, too-impossible, too-dangerous thing to want.

But now I’m standing on a sidewalk in Manhattan at almost midnight in December, and I’m looking at rings, and the question is right there.

Would I marry him?

I take a gulp of cold air when I know that, yeah, I would.

I would marry Griffin Hall in a heartbeat. I would marry him tomorrow at the Winterberry town hall, with only our family and close friends present. Hell, I’d marry him in the presence of the entire population of Winterberry, if that’s what he wanted.

I would put one of these bands on his finger, and I would spend the rest of my life waking up next to him in the same bed instead of driving back to a farm at three a.m.

I would do that.

I close my eyes for a second.

Then I picture the rest of it. The mornings when I make him coffee before he goes to work, the Sunday dinners at Sylvie’s when I can sit next to him and hold his hand or put my hand on his leg because it’s okay to do that.

Christmas.