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More clenching. “No,” I say, a little forcefully this time. “I’m not taking this ring back, Jamie. And we’re not breaking up.”
“Holden, stop.”
“Jamie,” I say. “That’s my baby inside you, and I have every right to be a father to him.”
“And you will be,” Jamie says. “I’m not going to stop you from seeing your child, Holden. If you want to see him, then you can.”
“Him?”
“It’s a boy.”
Tears come to my eyes without control. “Jamie,” I say. “I never stopped loving you. Not for a second. I was just confused. Trying to process everything, that’s all. That’s why I never really broke up with you.”
“You didn’t reply to a single text, Holden! Not mine, not Daniels!”
“I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was even out of touch with my own mother.”
“Fine,” Jamie says. “I get that you needed time to process, but didn’t you even once think of the baby? Didn’t you once worry about how I was doing? How the baby was doing?”
“What do you think, Jamie?” I say. “You have no idea how much I have suffered because of the way I treated you. But it just became a vicious cycle that I couldn’t get out of!”
“So why are you here, now?”
“Because it happened,” I say. “The cycle broke.”
“Any particular reason why?”
“I found out that report #HT shared was a fake.”
She looks up at me. “How did you find out?”
“I have my sources,” I say.
“So, you don’t doubt us anymore?”
“Jamie,” I say. “Forgive me.”
“She’s going to say yes,” Zaff says. “You just have to be consistent. You can’t give up.”
I take the ring in my hand. “This is my grandmother’s ring,” I say. “She and my mother they never quite got along so of course Mom wanted a new ring for her wedding. Even though I was adopted my grandparents and my father loved me like their own. For a long time, I didn’t even know I had a different biological father. And I used to love seeing that ring on grandma and every time she caught me watching she’d say the same thing: ‘Holden. The day you find the woman you love—you truly, truly, love—you will give this to her. It will make me happy in heaven.’ And then, she would add, ‘and it would piss off your mother, too.’”
Jamie laughs. “Your grandma really said that or did you just make that up?”
“None of it is made up,” I say, getting up. “Jamie, I would never hurt my grandma, alive or not. I could never give this ring to anyone, unless I was truly in love with her and that love is the only reason I gave you that ring. Because I knew you were the one I was going to marry, that I was going to love you for the rest of my life.”
I take her hand and put the ring back on her finger. “Don’t ever take it off, Jamie.”
“I don’t know what to say, Holden.”
“Say yes,” I say. “So you can have the honor of being my wife, wearing my grandma’s ring and pissing my Mom off, all at the same time.”
She laughs. “You drive a hard bargain.”
I kiss her.
She kisses me back, like she’s been waiting.
She starts to cry and I pull her up and take her in a hug.
