Chapter Eighty-Five: The Real Proposal

The last rib went up at ten past four on the twelfth of June, and the whole street came out to watch.

It rose slowly against a sky the color of washed linen, a single great curve of pale laminated timber, turning gently on the crane's cable with a man at each end holding a guide rope. The crew stood in a loose ring along the slab. Mrs. Wozniak had closed the bakery for an hour, an event without precedent, and stood at the fence with a basket on her hip and her arms folded, daring anyone to remark on it. Professor Okonkwo wore her green coat and had brought a folding chair. Grace Odom stood beside Priya in a hard hat, which she insisted was professional courtesy, and Whitmore, who had come on his lunch hour, held a clipboard he plainly did not need.

Ivy stood at the foot of the frame with her hands pressed flat against her ribs, because her heart seemed to have moved there.

"Easy," said Delgado, into his radio. "Easy. Little more. Hold."

The rib settled into its seat with a deep, soft sound, a note like a bell made of wood. The men on the scaffold bolted it. A cheer went up, ragged and warm and a little startled, and somebody whistled.

She was crying. She had not meant to.

---

By tradition, the last beam was signed before it went up, and Delgado had saved the felt pen for her.

"Architect first," he said, and held it out.

She had thought about what to write for a week. She went to the base of the rib, where the crew had laid a long section on trestles, and bent over the pale grain, and wrote her name in capital letters, REYES, with the R leaning very slightly to the right.

Then, underneath it, smaller, she added two letters. M.R.

She straightened and gave the pen to Delgado, and he signed, and then the crew, one at a time, in ones and twos, in blue and black and red, until the wood was a crowded, cheerful scrawl of names. Grace signed in a firm, upright hand. Mrs. Wozniak signed with a flourish and said that she did not care for how the pen smelled. Okonkwo signed, and Whitmore, and Priya, who wrote, in tiny letters, I stayed.

Near the bottom, almost at the edge of the grain, Ivy found a small hand she knew. D. Cross, it said. And after it, one word. Friend.

She looked at it for a long time.

---

The crew drifted away at five, in a clatter of lunch pails and tailgates. The bakery shutters rattled up on Eighteenth Street. The crowd thinned, and spoke of dinner, and went.

Delgado stopped beside her on his way to the gate. He looked at the sky, and at the frame, and at the tall man in the gray coat who had drifted, without seeming to, to the far side of the slab.

"Thirty minutes," said the foreman, quietly. "I'll lock the gate on my way out and sit in my truck. If anybody comes, I'll say we're checking the bolts." He put on his hat. "Good luck, kid."

"What for?" said Ivy.

"Ha," said Delgado, and walked away.

She stood alone in the middle of the unfinished floor.

---

The light had begun to turn. It came slanting through the long timber ribs in bars of gold and shadow, laying itself across the concrete in a pattern she had drawn a hundred times on trace paper and never once seen. It smelled of resin and cut pine. Above her the sky stood open, wide and pale, and every beam held its place against it, bare, unhidden, exactly as it was.

She turned. He was standing ten feet away.

He was in the plain coat. His hands were at his sides, open, with nothing in them. He had not brought flowers or an envelope or a box. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been waiting for a very long time in a very small space and was now finally permitted to be afraid.

"Ivy," said Damien.

"Hello."

"I'd like to stand," he said. "If it's all right. I've sat behind a desk for this once before and I didn't like how it went."

She laughed. It broke in the middle. "Stand."

---

"You told me once," said Damien, "on the floor of my study, among about four hundred photographs, that the middle of a build is when a building is most honest. Before the finishes. When you can still see how it stands." His voice shook, very slightly, and he let it. "You put that into a roof. I thought that if there was anywhere in the world I ought to ask you this, it was under it."

She could not speak.

"I want to say it plainly. I've practiced it. I've been told two pages is too long." He drew a breath. "I'm not offering a contract. I haven't drawn anything up, which Priya will tell you took considerable restraint. There's no term, and there's no number, and there's no clause."

He took one step forward.

"Ivy Reyes. Will you marry me?"

It was not a long sentence. It rang in the open frame like a struck bell.

"Not as an arrangement," Damien went on, a little unsteadily, before she could speak. "Not for the vote, or the board, or the optics. For no reason at all except that I want to. If the answer is not yet, I'll say okay, and I'll mean it, and I'll ask again whenever you like. Or I won't. Either one."

---

"You want to marry me," said Ivy.

Her voice came out scarcely above a whisper. She had been over this moment so many times in the dark, with the ovens shaking the floor beneath her, and not one of her versions had left room for how steady his face would look and how completely his hands would shake.

"Not pretend," said Damien. "Yes."

"That's insane."

"It is the least businesslike thing I have ever said," he agreed, and something broke at the corner of his mouth, a laugh and a sob at the same time. "I'm told that's a recommendation."

She was laughing and crying together now, with her hands against her mouth. She crossed the ten feet between them in three steps, and stopped in front of him, close enough to feel the warmth of him, and looked up into the face of the man who had once hired her for six months and had not, until this moment, ever asked.

"Yes," said Ivy. "Yes. Of course yes."

He made a sound she had never heard from him. He did not move, for one second, as though he did not trust that he had understood, and then he was laughing, and his arms had come round her, and he had lifted her clear off the concrete.

---

"I have terms," said Ivy, a little later, into his collar.

He set her down very carefully. He stood with his hands still on her shoulders and the tears running unashamed down his face, and said in a voice he had once used across an office desk, and used now in a different key entirely:

"I'm listening."

"One." She wiped her eyes. "No term. I don't want a number of days. I don't want an end date, not even a joke one."

"Agreed."

"Two. No exit clause." She looked him in the eye. "I'm not keeping a door open. If I ever leave, I'll tell you to your face, in daylight, and not in a note on a counter."

"Agreed," said Damien, and his voice cracked on it. "Though I'll never give you a reason."

"Three. You ask. You don't arrange."

"Agreed."

"Four. When I say I'm fine, you ask twice. And when I say no, sometimes, you don't make it an event."

"Agreed."

"Five. My name stays on my door."

"It was never anyone else's."

"Six." She drew a breath. "When it's time for the ring, we choose it together. Because the one you told that reporter about has been being resized for over a year."

He laughed out loud. The sound rang up through the open ribs. "It is the only lie I have ever told that I would like to make true."

"One more thing."

"Yes?"

Ivy took his hand. She turned it over in hers, and pressed his palm flat against her own, and held it there. Then she looked up at him in the failing gold light, and said, quite seriously, in the exact words he had once spoken to her over a handshake that lasted longer than business required:

"I don't share what's mine. Not even temporarily."

He did not speak. He did not seem able to. He stood with his fingers locked in hers and his whole face open, and then he bent his head, and she felt him laugh again, helplessly, against her forehead.

"Agreed," said Damien.

They did not let go. They stood in the center of the open frame in the last of the sun, under a roof that held its shape against the sky, with every beam bare and every name written, and the long light going slowly from gold to rose on the pale wood, and neither of them said anything at all.