Okay.
Like she always knew it and just needed to hear it the right way.
I've had a ring for three days.
Three days. Sitting in the inside pocket of my good jacket since the day I drove into town, walked into the jeweler on Main Street and pointed at the one that was exactly right without needing to look at anything else.
I know what I like when I see it.
Always have.
She's on the porch when I come back outside, leaning against the rail in the dark with her face tipped up toward the sky the way she does when she needs the open space of it, and the sight of her standing on my porch under the Texas stars looking like shebelongs there, because she does, hits me the same way it hit me the first time and every time since.
I'm not nervous.
That surprises me a little. I expected nervous. I've been cavalier about most things in my life but this is not most things, this is the thing, and I expected my hands to know the difference.
They're steady.
Because this is right and my hands have always known the difference between something right and something else.
I come to stand beside her at the rail and she glances at me, easy and unhurried, and we look out at the ranch together in the dark, the pasture and the tree line and our land to the east where the house sits quietly against the sky.
"Beautiful night," she says.
"Yeah," I answer. "It is."
I reach into my jacket pocket.
She feels the shift in me before she sees anything, that awareness she has of me that I stopped being surprised by weeks ago, and she turns, her eyes dropping to my hand and then coming back up to my face with an expression that does something to my chest I don't have a precise word for.
I hold the ring between us in the dark, simple and certain, not down on one knee because that's not how I'm built and she'd be the first to tell me so.
Just standing at the rail of the house I built with her and Hadley in mind, holding out the ring.
The question already answered in everything we've said and done and have chosen these past weeks but needing to be asked out loud anyway because some things deserve the words.
"Marry me," I say. Not a question exactly. More like a statement. "Build this with me. You and Hadley. Permanent and without apology. The whole thing."
She looks at the ring and then at me and then back at the ring.
She almost laughs. "You've been walking around with this in your pocket for two and a half days."
"Waiting on the right moment."
"And this is the right moment?" she asks, looking out at the dark ranch, the porch, the swing, the stars overhead.
"This is exactly the right moment," I tell her.
She looks back at me, and what's on her face is everything I've been watching build since the day she pulled up to this ranch.
"Yes," she says.
Simple and clean and exactly the right word.
I slide the ring onto her finger and she looks at it for a moment in the low light of the porch, and then she looks up at me with tears running down her face. I pull her in. Her arms going around me, her face against my shoulder, and we stand there on the porch of the house I built while the ranch holds us together.
"Hadley will be so happy to have her Daddy right here, all the time," she says into my shoulder.
