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“Gerald’s handling it.”

“I don’t like that answer.”

I dried my hands. I had the box in my pocket, empty now, because before dinner I’d handed the ring to a four-year-old with a craft-drawer ribbon and a plan, along with my word that I wouldn’t come down the hall and look.

Iris came back up the hall carrying Zamboni across both forearms, level and careful, held out in front of her the same as the adoption folder she’d carried out of the rescue. The ribbon was tied around Zamboni’s neck in a knot the size of a walnut, finished with three loops and a bow. The ring hung under her chin and swung when she moved. Iris walked to the middle of the rug and set her down very carefully, facing the couch, and stepped back with her hands clasped under her chin.

Zamboni sat. She looked at Delaney. She looked at me. Then she flattened her ears, shot sideways across the rug, and went under the couch so fast the tails of the bow snapped against the couch leg on the way in.

Iris gasped.

Delaney put the book down. “Why is the cat wearing a ribbon?”

“No reason,” Iris said, and then, with real despair, “Daddy.”

I was already down. I got on my knees on the rug beside the couch and put my cheek to the floor and looked under. Two eyes shone back at me from the dark at the far end, next to a hair tie Delaney had lost in November and a purple crayon. The bow had come half undone. The ring still hung under her chin, and it caught what little light reached under there.

I could have reached her. I didn’t try.

“Eli.” Delaney was on her knees on the rug now too, with her shoulder against mine, trying to see. “Is that my hair tie? I looked everywhere for that hair tie.” She put her cheek nearly to the tile beside mine and looked, and she stopped talking. Her hand, flat on the floor to brace her, closed slowly into a fist.

“Zamboni,” she said, very softly. “Come here, baby.”

The cat came. She’d been coming to that voice since the first week, across every floor in the house, onto every lap Delaney had, and she came now, out of the dark with her ears still back and the bow crooked and the ring swinging under her chin, and climbed straight into Delaney’s lap and sat down with her tail around her feet.

Delaney didn’t touch the ring. She sat back on her heels on the rug with the cat in her lap and looked at me, and her mouth was pressed shut, and her eyes were wet all the way along the bottom lid.

I was still on my knees on the rug. My palms were wet, and I wiped them down the thighs of my jeans, and it didn’t help. I’d run this a hundred times in the truck on the way home from the jeweler’s, and every time I ran it, she said not yet. She was thirty-seven. She’d had a whole life before Phoenix, and she’d started carrying herself back into the casita once already, one mug at a time, while I stood in a clean kitchen and never saw it. I was twenty-six, with a kid and a cat and a knee I’d been icing in February, kneeling in my own living room and asking her to take on all three of us for good. My mouth had gone so dry my tongue stuck when I opened it.

“I had a better speech,” I said. “It was shorter than this.”

“Eli.”

“I’m all in. I have been since August, and you know it, because I said it on camera at cleanout with the room listening.” My voice wasn’t steady and I let it not be steady. “You and me and Iris. For good. In this house, with your name on every form and your coffee in the whale mug and your laptop going at four in the morning where I can hear it. I’m asking you to marry me.” I looked down at the cat. “And the cat. She comes with it.”

Iris made a sound behind me, a held squeak, both hands over her mouth.

Delaney laughed. It came out of her wet and broken in the middle, and she put the back of her wrist against her mouth and the laugh kept going under it. When she took the wrist away she was crying and still laughing.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Obviously yes.”

I put one hand flat on the rug, because my arms had gone loose and the floor had tipped a few degrees under me. I’d been the only grown-up in this house who wasn’t going anywhere since Iris was fourteen months old, and a woman with a cat in her lap had just said obviously. My eyes stung. I let them. Iris was right behind me and I didn’t care if she saw.

Delaney reached out and wiped under my eye with her thumb. Zamboni, squashed between her stomach and my knee, let out a long, offended yowl, and Delaney looked down at her and laughed through the tears and smoothed a hand down her back. When she looked up at me again she had her chin set, the look she got when she’d already made up her mind and was about to tell me the terms.

“And I want another one,” she said.

“Another ring?”

“Another cat.” She put her hand on Zamboni’s back, and the cat leaned into it. “She needs a friend. She’s going to be lonely when Iris starts school, and I want one with a white face.”

I looked at her. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been washing a pan. Now I was on my knees in my living room, engaged to a woman who had just negotiated a second cat into the terms before I’d even got the ring on her.

“That’s a yes with a cat in it,” I said.

“You were never getting a yes out of me without a cat in it.”

Iris came around the end of the couch at a run and dropped onto her knees between us, Gerald still tucked under her arm. “Gerald says his name is Overtime.”