Page 198

The silver earrings that were her grandmother’s.

The turquoise ring on her left hand that Lana found and that she said yes to in her grandmother’s kitchen in Ignacio, which is where it needed to happen.

I knew that instinctively.

I didn’t wait long to ask her. Not because I was in a rush or afraid of losing her—but because when you know, you know.

And we both knew.

I asked her three weeks after she shot Trafton and the hearing—three weeks after the pull-off on the east bench, when she said she forgave me and asked me if I wanted to go home.

We had come to Ignacio for a weekend—Sienna’s surprise birthday party that Daniel was throwing.

She made dinner in Wíitsin’s kitchen the first evening.

I watched her, and I thought about the first time I sat at that table. The tea going cold. The drums barely audible through the walls. Her saying I love you with the absolute certainty of someone who had finished deciding.

Me freezing.

Me being the worst version of myself in the best possible moment.

I thought about all of it—the full accounting, the damage and the cost and the long road back—and I thought about her now, standing at the stove right now in her grandmother’s kitchen, stirring stew that smelled like green chile, her hair down, her feet bare on the flagstone floor.

I pulled the box from my pocket.

I’d been carrying it for two weeks since Lana sent it, after I told her what I was looking for, and she found the exact thing when I couldn’t.

I held it for a moment.

Then I walked up to her.

She turned and saw the box in my hand. Then she looked up at me, a smile on her face, and one eyebrow arched.

“Hmm.”

Not surprised. Of course, she wasn’t surprised.

I thought about making a speech, and then I thought about who she was and what she deserved, and I understood that what she deserved was the truth told plainly—the way she says everything that matters.

“You told me you loved me at this table.” I glanced at the kitchen table beside the island. “And I couldn’t answer you. But I’ve been answering you ever since—every day, in every way I know how. I want to answer you properly.” I held her gaze. “Will you marry me?”

She looked at the ring.

Rose gold with a deep blue-green turquoise—the color of the shawl she wore at the Bear Dance and the San Juan Basin sky and a hundred things that are hers.

“Yes,” she said.

With my heart full of joy, I slipped the ring on her finger.

She held her hand out and grinned. “It’s lovely.”

“Yeah? Lana helped me find it.”

“I know.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, you know?”

She’d met all my family over FaceTime by now, and they all liked her better than they liked me, which I accepted as a permanent condition.