I opened the box.
The ring was simple. A single stone, set low so it wouldn't catch on things, because Anna was a photographer and she used her hands and I'd spent three weeks designing it with a jeweler in Brickell who understood that the woman wearing this ring would value function as much as beauty.
"I want to spend the rest of my life breathing next to you," I said. "If you'll let me."
She laughed. And cried. At the same time. Her hand was over her mouth and her eyes were streaming and she was laughing. And the sound of it was the best thing I'd ever heard, better than music, better than the ocean, better than silence.
"Yes," she smiled. "Yes. Absolutely yes."
I slid the ring onto her finger. My hands were steady. No gloves. No tremor. My bare fingers touching hers in the middle of a crowded market where I couldn't stand for nineteen minutes a few months ago without my pulse trying to exit my body.
She kissed me. I kissed her back. The honey vendor watched and clapped. A woman at a candle stall cheered. A man with a dog whistled. The musician changed his song to something that sounded like a celebration.
I held her face in my hands, bare, and looked at her. Her cheeks were wet, her smile wide. She was wearing a ring I'd designed for her. The market was loud, crowded, chaotic. Nobody was sanitizing anything.
I was fine. Better than fine.
I washome.
Epilogue
ANNA
Six months later
I stood in a gallery in Wynwood surrounded by my photographs and tried to remember the woman who arrived in Miami with two suitcases, eight hundred dollars, and a name she couldn’t say.
My first solo show. The gallery was packed. Friends, strangers, people from the industry who’d seen the preview and wanted to be part of it.
The series was called "After." Portraits of people rebuilding. A woman reopening her bakery after a hurricane, flour on her hands, the new sign not yet painted. A teenager learning to walk after an accident, his physical therapist behind him, both of them grinning. An old man planting a garden where his house used to be, kneeling in the dirt, seedlings in his palm. Diane behind her counter in Cedar Key, Marcus on her hip, the Gulf blue through the window behind them.
Every photograph was about what comes next. Theafter. The part nobody sees because the story usually ends with the disaster and forgets that people keep going.
Mona was in the corner, loudly telling Priya the complete story of how Jace and I met. The coffee. The collision. The kiss. The vomit. The sanitizer. Priya was laughing so hard she had to hold the wall. Miles was attempting to intervene. He was failing. Nobody had ever successfully stopped Mona from telling a story and tonight was not going to be the breakthrough.
Caleb was at the drinks table, trying to pour a glass of wine for Miley with hands that were shaking. He’d flown in for the opening and had been circling Miley all evening like a satellite that couldn’t commit to an orbit.
"So I’ve been thinking," Caleb said, handing her the glass and sloshing a quarter of it onto his own shoe. "About what you said about maybe visiting North Carolina sometime. For the, um. The food. Because you’re in the food industry. And North Carolina has food."
Miley took the glass, sipped it, and looked at him over the rim. "North Carolina has food?"
"Really good food. Famous food. Like, um." He went blank. "Barbecue?"
"You’re inviting me to North Carolina for a barbecue."
"And other things. Museums. Nature. Trees." He was sweating. "There are a lot of trees."
Miley smiled. "I like trees," she said.
Caleb lit up like a man who’d just been told the meaning of life involved trees and he’d been right all along.
Jace appeared at my side wearing the black suit I chose and a gray tie I'd knotted this morning in the hallway of our penthouse, while he stood still and watched me with eyes that matched the silk under my fingers.
He was watching me the way he always did. Like I was a frame he wanted to memorize.
"Your brother just invited Miley to North Carolina for trees," he said.
"I heard."
