“Don’t say that again.” The quiet force in his voice catches me off guard.
“It’s true though.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Dane, out there you’d actually have a choice. Real choices.”
“I do have a choice.” That stops me.
“Look at me, Charlotte Gallagher.” He shifts closer until we’re face to face. His hands come up to my cheeks, holding me there. “I have a choice, and I make it every day.”
My breath catches.
“I choose you. There isn’t anyone else I want. There never will be.”
I go still, his words moving through me slowly, loosening something deep in my chest.
“I choose you too.”
“Then marry me,” he says.
A laugh slips out before I can stop it.
I look at him, and his expression never changes.
“You’re serious.”
“Dead serious.”
I open my mouth, then close it again, trying to catch up to the conversation somehow. “Dane… who’s going to marry us?”
“Wewill.”
I shake my head a little. “That’s not how it works.”
“Maybe not out there.” His gaze stays locked on mine. “But we decide what things mean here.”
He says it so simply, like the answer should be obvious. And something in me shifts because I understand exactly what he means. I’ve said the same thing before, whenever I wanted something badly enough to stop caring whether it made sense to anyone else.
“We’ve always decided things for ourselves out here. Every rule. Every choice. No one handed any of it to us.” His eyes stay locked on mine. “I want you to know I mean this.”
My chest tightens because I know he’s speaking from his heart.
“I want something that marks it.” I wait, my heart starting to beat harder. “I’ll make you a ring.”
And somehow that gets to me even more than the marriage proposal itself. Maybe because it feels real in a different way. Something he’ll make with his own hands. Something I’ll wear every day. Something constant.
His thumb brushes slowly across my cheek. “I want you to be my wife.”
I look at him—really look at him. The face I know better than my own. The man who’s been the hardest part of my life and somehow the most certain thing in it too.
This is what it means to love someone enough to keep choosing them over and over again.
I thought it was something I wanted someday.
I didn’t realize I was already living it.
“But it wouldn’t mean anything in the real world. Not legally. Not officially. Whatever we do here, out there it wouldn’t matter.”
