I was going to ask her to marry me. The thought didn't arrive as a question. It arrived as a sentence I'd been writing in my head for six months without noticing.
I would ask her on Nova's first birthday. The day we became parents on a state highway had turned into a year of something I never planned for and couldn't imagine undoing. The ring was the question that came after the year.
I called Reese on a Saturday. She picked up on the second ring, and I told her I needed her help picking a ring. The silenceon the other end lasted exactly two seconds before she said, "Finally." We drove to Saratoga the following weekend. Reese vetoed the first three, pointed me to a case in the back I would have walked past, and stood beside me while I looked at the one I knew Audrey would wear: simple, warm, a stone that caught light without asking for it. I bought it. Reese cried in the parking lot and made me swear not to tell anyone.
I called Astrid and asked if she'd be ready to come to a small thing at my parents' on Nova's birthday. Astrid said yes without asking what it was. She already knew.
I'd not told my parents yet. I drove there on a Wednesday evening, a week before Nova's birthday.
The Rhodes kitchen smelled like vanilla, something baked, and the particular warmth of my mother's stove in late afternoon. My dad was at the table with the paper. My mother was at the counter, apron on, a serving spoon in her hand. The radio was on low. The house smelled like every Wednesday of my childhood: small, warm, full of the sounds of two people who had been married for thirty-five years and moved around each other without thinking about it.
My mother turned from the stove before I said a word. She read my face. She had been reading it for thirty-three years now, and she was faster than anyone I'd ever met.
"You want to tell me something," she said.
I stood in the kitchen doorway. I'd rehearsed the line on the drive over. I was going to say the version that had been sitting in my chest for six months.
"I'm going to ask Audrey to marry me. On Nova's birthday."
My mother set the spoon on the counter. She crossed the kitchen without waiting for my father to react. Her arms went around me, firm and tight, her head against my chest because she'd been a head shorter than me for twenty years, and the hug had never changed shape. She held on. I held on.
She let go and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Of course you are."
My dad hadn't moved from the table. He sat with the paper flat under his hands, and his face did something I hadn't seen before. Not the pride thing, not the highlight reel. Something quieter. Something underneath.
He stood. Came around the table. Put his hand on the back of my neck, the same grip from the morning I sat in this kitchen and told him Audrey asked me to leave. The older language. The one from before I was big enough to carry things.
"About damn time, kid." He said it the way he called a play from the sideline—like he'd seen it coming for three quarters and was just waiting for his guy to run it.
He held the grip for a beat. Then he nodded.
"Now ask her."
The words were small, and they were enough. My father, who spent thirty-two years loving me in the language of forward motion and game plans, was standing in his kitchen giving me the only thing the moment needed: permission to stop moving and stay.
My mother was already behind us. She would make the cake. She would tell Caroline. She would make sure Reese didn't ruin the surprise by texting Audrey something cryptic about what to wear. I laughed.
My dad sat back down at the table. Picked up the paper. The small mercy of a man who knew how to let his son walk out of a big moment without having to hold eye contact.
I left.
The truck was in the driveway, the late light on the windshield, the ring box in the back of my closet at home. I sat behind the wheel for a beat.
I spent thirty-two years building a version of my life that nobody could be disappointed in. I didn't build the version I was about to ask Audrey to share. I stopped building. I just lived in it, and the living was the best thing I'd ever done.
I put the truck in gear.
CHAPTER 24
Audrey
The birthday banner Duke's mother made was tied across the kitchen archway with two pieces of twine and a confidence in spacing that suggested she'd measured it twice. The letters were hand-cut from green felt. NOVA. ONE. A small fox stitched into the corner of the O because Diane Rhodes didn't do things halfway.
Two coffee mugs on the counter. The picture on the bookshelf—me on the curb in front of my building the night of the fire, Nova against my chest, the shock blanket over my shoulders, the red and white of the engine behind us. Astrid put it in a frame six months ago and brought it over without asking if I wanted it. I kept it on the shelf because I couldn't decide what to do with it, and then I stopped trying to decide, and it stayed.
Through the wall, I could hear Duke's voice. Low, easy, the morning register he used with Nova when he was getting her dressed. "Arms up. There you go. Other arm. Good girl." Nova making the small sounds back—not words yet, not all of them, but the sounds that meant she was participating in the conversation because her father expected her to participate in conversations and she had been meeting that expectation since she was four months old.
I stood at the counter spreading cream cheese on bagels and let the morning sit in my chest.
