“Indeed you are,” Effie said with a wink. “Once you are a married woman you can hardly go around proclaiming ‘the magazine above all else.’”
He was teasing, but the thought was still so . . . upending. “Why is it so easy for you to love?”
He grew serious once he realized that she hadn’t joined him in his jesting. “I don’t know. I suppose because of my friends. Who will be your friends, too, if you will allow it.”
“I have been so afraid to lose the magazine. But I think that was a proxy for my real fear, which was to lose . . . myself. I realize that makes very little sense.”
“No, it makes perfect sense. But if we are to follow the metaphor. . .” He turned up his palms. “If you will allow me?”
“Of course. Metaphors are your department.”
“Your magazine has been chipped away at over the years by the Glanvils. You have been trying to protect it, but it has put you in a terrible position of constantly being on the defensive.”
Yes, that felt right. And it was so exhausting to be constantly on the defensive.
“And perhaps,” she said, speaking slowly, for she was articulating new thoughts as they formed, “in being so focused on the minutia of defending it, I have lost sight of the larger mission.”
“Yes.” He beamed like a proud tutor. “And what is the larger mission?”
“The larger mission is love. Belonging. Trusting that the people I love—the person I love—won’t leave.”
“Oh! Now we are off the magazine metaphor and on to sentiment!”
“Well, let’s say the larger mission is loveanda new, better magazine.
“Love andEvans’s Lady’s Book.”
“We arenotcalling it that.”
“Perhaps we ought to speak to our investors about titles. Perhaps we ought to speak to them tonight, over dinner. That might help with the ‘belonging’ bit of the equation.”
“Perhaps we ought to,” she agreed. “To return to what I was saying, though—to close it off, I hope—I just want to make sure you know what you’re . . . getting with me.”
“I know what I’m getting with you.”
“You’re getting a woman who cannot give you a child.” She wasn’t sure why she was belaboring this point, except that it seemed impossible that she was on the verge of having everything she’d ever wanted. Everything she’d never allowed herself to want.
“I am getting a woman who can give me everything. I am getting a woman who changed the color of the sky,” Effie said. “I am getting a woman on a beach under a chartreuse sky.”
Andshewas getting everything she’d never let herself want. How extraordinary. “Oh. All right, then.”
“However,” Effie said with a twinkle in his eye, “I don’t believe I’ve actually heard you articulate the question.”
“The question?”
“The question in question.”
“I thought you were a poet.”
“Apparently not when a lady is making a suit of marriage. Apparently then I take leave of my literary senses. But I am not wrong. You have said you are proposing—more than once. But I never actually heard a question, did I?” His strange-beautiful eyes danced.
“Effie,” she said, her heart close to bursting. “Will you do me the honor of marrying me?”
“Yes,” he said, and Julianna was free.
Epilogue
One month later
