"You're doing the thing," she says.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you go quiet and your jaw does that."
"My jaw doesn't do a thing."
"Colm."
I stop walking. The fire's throwing orange light across her face and I think, not for the first time, that I could stand here doing nothing but look at her for the rest of my life and call it a full day's work.
My hand's sweating around the ring box in my pocket. I've carried heavy timber, hauled gear off the side of a mountain in a storm, and none of it made my palms slick the way this does.
"I had a speech," I say. "Practiced it on Spruce this morning. He wasn't impressed."
"You never mentioned a speech."
"Lost most of it around June. Kept it down to four words." My voice isn't steady and I don't try to fix it. "Figured I'd better say them before I lose those too."
I get down on one knee in the dirt. The whole crowd around the fire goes quiet the way a room does when it senses something's about to happen — I hear Owen say something low to Grace, hear her laugh catch in her throat. My hands are shaking when I open the box. Small stone. Plain gold band. I picked it because it looked like her — nothing showy, exactly right, built to last through actual use.
"Stay with me," I say, and that's as far as the speech ever got, four words, and somehow they're still the only ones that matter. "Marry me. Let me be there for the next one, and the one after, and every festival for as long as we get. I've known since your daughter grabbed my finger and didn't let go. I'm done sitting on it."
She's crying before I finish. Fast, sudden tears she's laughing through at the same time, like her whole face can't agree on one reaction.
"Yes," she says. "Obviously yes. Warn a girl next time."
My hands are still shaking when I get the ring on her finger. I don't trust my legs to stand right away, so I stay there a second longer than I need to, forehead against her hip, just breathing, before she pulls me up by the collar and kisses me in front of the whole fire, the whole town, and somebody starts clapping and it spreads down the crowd like something catching.
"Take me home," she says against my mouth.
"Fireworks haven't started."
"We'll watch from the cabin."
The cabin's dark when we get in. I don't turn on a single lamp. I light the fire pit out back instead, the one I built the spring after she moved in, and I pull the old quilt off the porch swing and lay it out on the grass where the trees break just enough to see sky.
"Sit," I tell her.
"Bossy."
"You said yes to that too."
She laughs and sits, and I sit behind her, legs on either side, her back against my chest, my arms crossed over her front. The treeline's black against a sky that's going to open up any minute. The crickets chirp and the wind is warm. Silver Ridge does its fireworks off the ridge above the lodge every closing night, and from here you see them clear the tops of the pines like something rising.
"I've got questions," she says. "About June. What happened to the speech?"
"I practiced it on Spruce. He judged me."
"He's a good judge."
"He is." I move her hair off her neck, mouth against the skin there, and feel her breath change under my hands. "I kept starting over. Every version sounded like I was asking permission for something I already knew the answer to."
"You weren't wrong."
The first firework goes up — gold, then a slow green bloom over the trees — and she tips her head back against my shoulder to watch it, and I watch her instead. Married. Not on paper yet, but said out loud, meant, done. I get one hand under the hem of her dress and she doesn't stop me, doesn't even look away from the sky, just shifts to give me better access and lets a sound out low in her throat when I find her.
"Colm."
