He looks at me across the creek bend.
Maisie's hand squeezes mine once.
Then she lets go and moves to stand with Remy and there's nothing between me and the oak tree except thirty feet of Texas ground, evening light and months of everything we've built.
I walk toward him.
He watches me come with his expression completely open. Just Beckett. The man who drove all night from San Francisco. The man who flooded the east field, cantered a horse in front of the whole town, stood in a flash flood, said tell me what we need.
The man who made two cups of coffee every morning without ever having to think about it anymore.
I stop in front of him.
For one suspended second neither of us says anything.
He looks at me for a moment. Like he's taking something in that he wants to remember exactly.
"Hi," he says softly.
"Hi," I say back.
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his hand staying at my jaw the way it always stays.
"I had a speech," he says. "Edited it three times."
"What happened to it?"
"You walked across that field and I forgot every word." He holds my gaze. "So I'm just going to say the true things."
"Okay," I say.
He takes both my hands.
"You are the reason Silver Mesa is home," he says. "Not the ranch. Not twelve hundred acres. You.
The woman who showed up at a moving truck disaster with her arms crossed and decided I wasn't going to last a month and then spent several months making sure I did." He pauses. "You made me into someone who belongs here. I don't know how to thank you for that except to spend the rest of my life doing it."
My eyes are doing something I am definitely not keeping under control.
I stopped managing things a while ago.
He reaches into his shirt pocket. Takes out the small box. Opens it.
The ring catches the oak tree light and I look at it for one second before I look back at his face because his face is what I want to see.
He's looking at me the same way.
"Laney Jenkins," he says quietly. "Will you marry me?"
The creek moves steady and quiet beside us.
Behind me Maisie makes a sound she's been holding since this morning.
I think about, “not yet”, at a round pen. About “eventually.” About a door I left open on purpose.
"Yes," I say.
Not eventually. Not yet.
