Page 107 of The Unknown Birds

“If only it felt like enough.”

“Well nothing’s ever enough, is it? Did you imagine this life, when you were a little girl?”

“Teaching? No. Even as a child, I didn’t daydream much about the future. I expected it would involve a lot of scrubbing—floors or pots or laundry—and painful, chapped red hands.”

She glanced down at her hands as she said it, and he caught them in his.

“No dreams of handsome strangers to whisk you away from all that scrubbing?”

Ash snorted.

“No, you wouldn’t. How about a brood of children to help you then?”

She shook her head. “I knew what I was.”

“A magpie?”

Ash laughed. “One for sorrow, two for joy?”

“Curious and resourceful and fiercely protective.”

She smiled. “Thank you for the compliment, but I was going to say, an ugly duckling. And far too headstrong for my own good. Afraid of my own shadow, though God forbid I let anyone know it. Get my back against the wall and I would fight, but I didn’t like to. I think all I ever truly wanted was to feel safe.”

“Do you feel safe? Here in this garden?”

Ash looked up at the cloudless sky and imagined incendiary bombs falling all around them, the flowers going up in smoke and flame. But the sky was too blue and perfect, the songbirds far too happy to imagine any such thing for very long.

“Yes,” she answered truthfully. She always felt safer when he was near.

It must have been the right answer because he took her hand again and squeezed it, then nodded towards a bird flapping away on the ground. “What kind of bird is that, Miss?”

She laughed. “Some kind of flycatcher, isn’t it?”

“Is it injured?”

“I hope not,” Ash replied, standing up to get a better look, but her shadow sent the little creature racing for the safety of a nearby tree. “All good it seems,” she said, turning back around to find Rook, shifted forward on their bench, holding out a ring that glinted in the afternoon sunshine.

Her heart warmed, then froze, and she fought the urge to burst into tears yet again.

“I’ve been struggling with the right words to tell you in a way I haven’t already said. Somehow, despite everything, my years at war were the best years of my life because of you. That might sound maudlin and more than a little tragic, except it can’t be tragic, because there was you and there was love—a love that has sustained me all the decades in between. Marry me, Ash, so we can start our lives over with one shared soul between us as it was always meant to be.”

“I—I…” She wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t. She was trying to say, I can’t, but her throat wouldn’t allow that either, and instead she just stood there like a puppet without any strings.

Some of the light dimmed from his eyes. “Must I go down on one knee?” he teased, scooting to the edge of the bench so he could maneuver it.

“Please don’t,” she said, and he paused, light all but fading. “It’s—it’s not a no,” she added feebly.

His smile was sad as he placed the ring in his breast pocket where her poem used to be, leaving his hand there as though his whole chest ached. “It’s also not a yes,” he said gently, staring at the ground.

“Please, Rook. I love you more than the flowers love the sun. Every beat of my heart is in answer to yours. But are you sure this isn’t just September looming over you as it does me?”

“September may have parted us once, but why not let this September unite us again for always?”

“Always. How can you speak of always with war knocking at the door?” she asked, retaking her seat on the bench and tucking her feet beneath her.

“What better time?”

“It is selfish, Rook.”