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All night he’s been a live wire, and now he’s gone still, planted in the grass in a collared shirt Dottie must have fought him into, looking at me with the seriousness he saves for the things that matter most to him.

“Olivia,” he says. “Come here. I have to ask you something.”

I look for Luke. He’s not beside me anymore.

Dottie’s stopped in the doorway behind me, both hands pressed over her mouth. And I turn back to Bo, and I walk toward him across the grass under the lights.

I stop in front of Bo.

“What do you need to ask me?”

“Will you marry my dad?”

I follow his eyes and I turn around.

Luke is on one knee in the grass.

Chapter 38

Luke

I got down on one knee while Bo was talking, while her back was to me.

Now she’s turned around, and she’s looking at me on one knee in the grass under lights I hung at six this morning so they’d be perfect by dark, and I get to watch it happen on her face. The whole thing. The disbelief first, then the understanding. Then the tears, all at once.

I’ve imagined this a hundred times, in the truck, in the bay at the station, lying awake on the couch the night she slept in my bed. I never once got the look on her face right, because there’s no imagining it.

I’ve thought about what I’d say for three weeks. I had it down. I practiced it in the truck.

I don’t remember a word of it.

So I just tell her the truth, which is the only thing I’ve ever been able to do with her anyway.

“Olivia.”

That’s as far as I get before my own voice quits, and I have to stop and get it back, and Bo, next to me, whispers, “You got this, Dad,” at a volume the whole yard can hear, which does not help and also helps more than anything.

“Six months ago,” I start again, “a wrong number texted me.”

She laughs, both hands over her mouth now.

I get the box out of my pocket. My hands aren’t steady, and I don’t try to hide it, because she’s the one person I never have to be steady for.

“This was my grandmother’s.” I open it. Four small diamonds, gold gone soft with age. “It’s not much. It was all my grandfather could afford, and they were married fifty-one years, and it stayed on Dottie’s hand every one of them.”

I hear Dottie sniffle by the door.

“I don’t have a lot of words. You know that too. So here’s the only one that matters.” I look up at her. “Marry me and stay for good.”

I’ve loved this woman long enough to know she’s not hesitating. She’s just doing the thing she does, taking the biggest moment of her life and making absolutely sure of it before she speaks, because Olivia doesn’t say a word she doesn’t mean.

Then she drops down into the grass in front of me, on her knees, so we’re eye to eye, which is the least Olivia thing and the most Olivia thing at the same time, and she takes my face in both hands, and her hands are shaking and she looks at me like I’m the only thing that has ever happened.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes. All of them. Every single one.”

I get the ring on her finger. It fits like it was always hers.

And then she turns to Bo.