Page 46 of Honest Neglect

“Amazing,” I replied. “I know there’s still a lot of work to do—you know, in terms of healing, and the work on your new house, but this is exactly what I wanted. This is the start I needed.”

He grinned at me. We had started work on his new home a few weeks ago, officially, now that the remains of what had been there before had been cleared out. It was strange, looking at this bare patch of land that had once held his home, but we would put together a new house there. One for both of us. I could live right next to my mom and share a place with Warren. I couldn’t have been happier about it, even if the enormity of the work ahead of us seemed more than I could wrap my head around.

“What about you?” I asked, tilting my beer bottle in his direction. Silver padded up the porch steps beside us and laid down at my feet. I reached down to give her head a scratch. She had healed up completely from the attack on the animal shelter a few months ago, and I had been doing some fundraising around town to build a new one. It wasn’t much, but it seemed the least I could do to atone for what had happened.

“What about me?” Warren replied, slipping his arm around me as he took a sip of his beer.

“You’re not going to get bored out here?” I remarked, gesturing around. “Things aren’t going to be too quiet for you?”

He chuckled. “Well, if they ever do get boring, Leroy has offered me some work with his crew,” he remarked. “But I think I’m happy with things the way they are right now. I don’t want anything to change. Well, apart from maybe one thing.”

I turned to him, a confused expression on my face.

“Oh, yeah?” I replied. “And what’s that?”

“I want you to marry me.”

He said the words calmly, almost matter-of-factly. My heart skipped several beats inside my chest. What? Did he just say that he wanted to...?

“You want to marry me?” I breathed, and he nodded.

“I love you, Lily,” he replied, turning to face me, a warm expression lighting up his face. “You have no idea how much I love you. Seeing everything you’ve been through and the person you’ve come out on the other side as, I...I don’t think I could love anyone more if I tried. And I want to be there for you as you start to build your new life. I want to be there for all of it. And I want to be your husband, your partner in life. In everything.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak, too stunned by what I was hearing to wrap my head around it. He wanted to marry me? I knew he wanted a future with me, he had made that much totally clear, but...marriage? That was something else entirely.

And something, I realized suddenly, that I was totally and utterly certain I wanted.

“I would love to be your wife,” I murmured to him. “I...I never really thought about it like that before, but...”

But I could see myself with a ring on my finger, I could see us living out a life in a new home together—Silver at our feet, tripping over her as we made coffee in the morning before we headed off to whatever we had to do for the day. A warm, comfortable life that I could enjoy every part of with a man I knew would stand by me through anything. He had proven himself to me these last few months, shown himself to be willing to help me through whatever the world threw at me. I would never find someone like him again, and I didn’t need to. Because I had the love of my life sitting right here with me, asking me for a future together, and I couldn’t wait for it to start.

“I love you, Warren,” I told him as I leaned across the loveseat to plant a kiss on his lips. He tucked his hand underneath my hair, pulling me in close. I could taste the beer on his lips but something else, too. A promise of the future together. A future I had never even dared let myself dream about because it seemed too dangerous to even think it might be possible. A future I wanted more than anything in the world.

And with my tormentors finally behind bars, a future I could actually live out. I could hardly wait.

Epilogue

Warren

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I DIPPED THE PAINTBRUSH into the can once more and swept a long stroke of it along the walls. The bright pink practically glowed in the early evening sun, and I took a step back to see how it would look under this light.

“It looks amazing,” Lily remarked as she made her way into the room behind me. I glanced around to see her hanging on to a pack of those horrible pickle-flavored chips she insisted I pick up every time I was in the store. I didn’t know why she craved them so much, but I figured that was just the magic of pregnancy.

“You think?” I asked as I dropped the brush back into the can again. This was the last part of our renovations, the final piece in the puzzle of our new home. It had been nearly a year since we had started putting this place together, and it had been a hell of a lot of hard work—but now it was nearly done, and now this final part was almost done, I couldn’t have been happier with how it had turned out.

The home I’d had before, before Tony and Mark had burned it to the ground, hadn’t felt as much like mine as this one did. Because I had poured so much time and effort into every part of this new place to make sure it was everything Lily wanted it to be. It was the least I could do, the least she deserved—a palace where she could be comfortable living out the rest of her life with me. She had helped where she could, but once she had gotten pregnant, I had insisted she take more time off to relax and rest. I knew how tough it was going to be on her, and I been running around like crazy to make sure she had everything she needed.

“What are we going to do if it’s a boy?” I asked her, gesturing to the Pepto-Bismol pink of the walls I had been working on. She grinned as she took a bite of her chips.

“Then I guess he’s just going to have to be a boy who loves pink,” she replied with a shrug.

I chuckled. “I guess so,” I agreed as I put an arm around her to steer her to the living room. She was just a few weeks out from giving birth now, and I didn’t want her exerting herself any more than she had to. She had just come back from the new animal shelter that she was helping to fundraise for, homing some of the dogs who had come in, and she must have been exhausted.

“I’m not going to collapse if I stay on my feet for more than a few minutes,” she laughed as we headed down to the living room. “You’re worse than my mom.”

“I don’t think I’m that bad yet,” I protested. Diane had been around nearly every day since we had told her about Lily’s pregnancy, rushing around to make sure she had everything she could possibly need. It didn’t matter how many times I tried to explain to her I had it under control, she was determined to help out any way she could.