Page 105 of Don't Tell

The folder is on the table between us. He has left the copies. He took nothing with him except whatever he is carrying that does not belong to me anymore.

I look at her and take her hand across the table.

"I love you."

It is not the word as a last attempt. It is not desperate. It is not the word in the foyer with her hand on the door. It is true, and I'm saying it because there is no reason not to.

"I love you too."

I lean across the table and kiss her.

It is not a first kiss. It is not the alley. It is not the suite in Santa Barbara. It is a kiss that knows something the earlier ones did not, which is that the woman across the table has stayed and that the man at this end of the table has, for the first time in his adult life, told the truth in a room that had to hear it.

When I pull back, her face is flushed and tired and here.

I look at her and think, with a quiet I have not had access to before, that I'm going to be doing this with her for the rest of my life.

I don't say it.

I don't have to.

I squeeze her hand.

We sit in the lounge for a long time.

Epilogue

Cade

Four months after the talk with Adrian.

I'm in my study with the door closed and a velvet box in my hand.

The box is from a small jeweler on Maiden Lane. The ring inside is not something she would have picked from a tray, but it is the one I picked for her — a pale green stone in a thin gold setting, not a diamond. It looks, when she puts it on, like something she has owned her whole life and has just remembered she had.

She doesn’t know I have it.

She doesn’t know I'm proposing tonight.

She has been in the bedroom for forty minutes. We came back from her show two hours ago with her hair already down and her shoes already off, and she has been humming through the closed door.

The show was at Iris's gallery in Oakland. Six pieces. A small write-up in the local paper this morning. Three of the six sold. Iris told her, quietly, that this is what a debut is supposed to feel like. Suzanne told me, quieter, that it had not felt like anything yet because she has not been able to stop trembling.

I watched her in that gallery tonight.

I watched her stand by a piece that was hers and have a person tell her, with the small inarticulate awe of what the piece had done to them.

She did not deflect.

She thanked them.

She thanked them in her own voice, in her own name, in the room.

I had to sit down for two minutes in the back office because my throat was dry and tight in a way it hadn't been in years.

I have chosen tonight for two reasons.

The first is that the room at the auction will be full of my world. Beau. Vivienne. Henry. Theo. Every collector, board member and old friend I have shown up beside for ten years. The second is that the only version of this I have not yet given her is the version where the room watches.