Page 95 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Yes."

"I had more."

"Yes anyway."

He slides the ring on my finger and comes up off that knee and kisses me while the hedge falls completely apart. Millie is honking into Debbie's tissues. Debbie is filming and crying at the same time. The walkie crackles, satisfied. "Mission complete. Bring me my binoculars back, Millie."

We're walking back through the blue-purple dusk, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder, when my phone lights up.

Rue Hawthorne: Couple twelve. My record stands. — R

I laugh and show Owen, and he's still grinning when the second text lands underneath it.

Rue Hawthorne: P.S. The Hall is yours the second Saturday of October. Roof open. I booked it before he parked the truck. Don't argue with me, Nellie. I've never once been wrong.

"Ninety days landed Tuesday," he says.

"What landed Tuesday?"

"My leave. Ninety days, that was the deal I made with myself the whole drive down. Get my head right, go back to Chicago." His thumb traces the ring on my finger. "I never even looked."

"Looked at what?"

"The date I was supposed to leave. It's still out there on the calendar somewhere." He huffs a laugh, quiet, like something is coming loose in him one knot at a time. "I used to know it to the day. Counted down like a man doing time. Somewhere between the stitches and the storm and you, I quit counting. This town stopped being before and turned into now."

"Owen."

"I counted it out on the interstate, Nellie. Against the odometer, somewhere in Missouri. The clock ran out Tuesday, and the second Saturday of October was the day I circled to load the truck and drive north." He tips his head at my phone, and his eyes are shining and wrecked all at once. "That's the day she booked. The day I was supposed to be gone."

I stare at the phone. Back down the path, Millie and Debbie are dragging their lawn chairs out of the hedge, arguing over who cried first. Rue was never even here.

EPILOGUE

NELLIE

Seven months later

The new engine has been under a tarp for three days, and Debbie Sue Monroe has personally threatened two teenagers and one dog to keep it that way.

"It's a fire truck," I tell her, easing myself into the folding chair she's guarding like a throne. "Everybody knows what's under there."

"They know it's a truck." She smooths the bunting on the podium for the fourth time. "They don't know what it says."

Neither do I. Nobody does except Debbie, the crew, and the painter out of Kerrville who was sworn to secrecy with a pan of Debbie's cobbler. I've asked Owen six times. My husband, who tells me everything now, who narrates his whole day to my belly every night like the baby's taking notes, shrugged his shoulders.

The whole town is here. Chairs on the station apron, kids on shoulders, June passing out sweet rolls that were supposed to be for after. Amos Kessler's got the front row and a pocket full of butterscotch he thinks I can't see. Merle Haskins is telling anybody who'll stand still how the roof came down "not forty feet behind us, I counted."

Rue's running the show, clipboard and all, pointing James at a speaker stand like he's a piece of equipment. He carries it where she points, pushes his glasses up, kisses her temple on his way past. She swats him. She's smiling when she does it.

Millie has claimed a chair dead center and put Earl in charge of her purse.

"You look like you swallowed the moon," she tells me, delighted.

"Thank you, Millie."

"Any day now?"

"Twelve days." My hand goes to the curve of my stomach, the way it does a hundred times an hour. Our girl rolls under my palm like she heard. We found out at the halfway scan, in a little room in Kerrville, both of us crying before the tech finished the sentence. A girl.