I look at it for a long moment, thinking about a woman leaning against a counter in a warm kitchen saying I love you like she's been saying it her whole life.
I close the box. Put it back in the drawer. Close the drawer.
Not tonight.
Pearl said don't make her wait much longer.
I don't intend to.
I take her hand and we head upstairs.
Chapter twenty-two
Worth Fighting For
Laney
The ring is coming.
I don't know when. I don't know what it looks like. I don't know the exact moment he decided or how long he's been carrying it around in whatever careful, deliberate way Beckett Wilder carries things he considers important.
I just know it's coming.
I knew it the night at the piano when he said there's something I want to ask you.
Then he looked at me across the living room with that expression that had nothing managed left in it. I knew it when Itold him the answer was yes before he asked and he said I want to do it right.
I knew it Sunday evening when Pearl Bishop found him near the porch steps and talked to him in that low direct way she talks to people when she's saying something that matters.
I know the ring is coming.
What surprises me is what that knowledge does to me.
Not terror. Not the cold hollow feeling of someone standing at the edge of something that could destroy them. Something else. Something that takes me a few days of quiet early mornings to identify correctly.
Weight.
Good weight. The kind that comes from something being real enough to be felt.
The kind that says this matters. This is permanent. This is the thing you've been moving toward without knowing it, and now it's close enough to see clearly.
I sit on my cabin porch on Monday morning with my coffee and I let myself feel the gravity of it without trying to make it smaller.
It's considerable.
It's also exactly right.
I think about what permanent means in practical terms. Not the romantic version, the firelight version, the dancing at Whiskey River version. The Monday morning version.
The version where two lives are genuinely joined, where a man's choices are my choices, where his daughter is not just a child I love but a child I'm responsible for in a way that goes beyond being her father's girlfriend.
Maisie.
I think about Maisie specifically and the weight shifts into something warmer.
She knocked on my door with French toast, sat on my cabin porch, and told me I did it first. Then she said she thought it would be good for everyone, including Rowdy with the calm certainty of someone who had already decided and was simply checking whether I had too.
She decided before either of us.
