Chapter Forty Five

Adam's POV

He had started planning the proposal in February, which felt, in retrospect, like exactly the wrong season to start planning anything that involved a ring and a field and the particular quality of light he had in mind — but he had learned, over the past several months, that the things worth doing right were rarely convenient, and he had decided he was done choosing convenience over correctness.

The ring itself had taken six weeks.

He had gone to three jewelers before he found the right one — a small, independent craftsman two states over who worked almost exclusively by commission and had a reputation, among the very specific circle of people who cared about such reputations, for being able to translate an idea into a physical object with an accuracy that bordered on unsettling. Adam had sat across from the man, whose name was Elias, in a workshop that smelled of metal and polish, and had tried to describe what he wanted.

"I don't want something large," he'd said. "I don't want it to look like what it cost. I want it to look like a field at dusk, right before it rains. Wildflowers. Something that looks like it grew there rather than something that was made."

Elias had looked at him for a long moment. "Tell me about the field," he'd said.

So Adam had told him. About the farm. About the loft. About a summer he had not expected and a woman who had changed the entire trajectory of his life in the space of three weeks without trying to change anything at all. About the rain the night before everything fell apart, the way the fields had looked from the porch, gold going gray going gold again as the light shifted.

Elias had listened without interrupting, the way good craftsmen listen, taking the story in as material rather than narrative, and at the end he'd said: "I can do that."

The ring that came back six weeks later was exactly what Adam had asked for and somehow more than he could have specified — a cluster of small, irregular stones arranged like wildflowers caught mid-bloom, the gold around them worked to look weathered rather than polished, like something that had been growing in that field for years rather than manufactured in a workshop two states away.

He kept it in the drawer of his desk in the second-floor office, wrapped in the same soft cloth Elias had sent it in, and he looked at it sometimes in the evenings when Jules and Eli were occupied with something downstairs, just to remind himself it was real, that this part of the plan was actually moving forward and not just existing as an idea he was circling.

* * *

He had not decided, in February, exactly when he would ask. He had a vague sense of timing — sometime in the spring, when the snow had cleared and the garden Jules had started taking an interest in was beginning to show signs of life, something about the symbolism of new growth that felt right without being heavy-handed about it. But he hadn't pinned a date. He was, he told himself, waiting for the moment to present itself rather than forcing one into existence.

He talked to Dorian about it in March, over coffee at the old man's house, an arrangement that had become a quiet, regular thing between them — not frequent, not formal, but real, the kind of relationship two men build when they both love the same woman in different registers and have decided, separately, to respect what the other brings to her life.

"I want to ask her," Adam had said. "I have the ring. I just don't know when."

Dorian had looked at him over his coffee with the particular assessing quality that Adam had come to recognize as the old man's default mode, the residue of a lifetime spent reading rooms for threats. "You're asking my opinion?"

"I'm asking your opinion."

Dorian had considered this. "Don't make it a production," he'd said finally. "She has had enough of her life turned into spectacle by other people's decisions — the fire, the arrest, the custody papers, all of it public, all of it taken out of her hands. Give her something small. Something that's just hers. Just the two of you."

Adam had thought about that for weeks afterward. The size of the moment versus the size of the gesture. He had access to resources that could produce almost any spectacle he wanted — a private chartered flight to somewhere extraordinary, a string quartet hidden in the garden, a hundred ways to make a proposal look like the kind of thing that ended up in magazines.

He thought about Dorian's advice. He thought about Jules's face the night at the lake house when she'd reached for his hand in the dark without saying anything, the way the quietest moments between them had always carried more weight than anything performed.

He decided, sometime in late March, watching her from the kitchen window as she knelt in the garden with Eli, both of them filthy and laughing about something he couldn't hear, exactly what he was going to do.

Nothing large. Nothing public. Just the two of them, in their own kitchen, on an ordinary morning, the way the most important things in their relationship had always actually happened — not in grand declarations but in the accumulation of small, true, unguarded moments.

He went back to his desk that evening and took the ring out of its cloth and looked at it again.

Soon, he thought.

Spring is coming. Everything is coming back to life. It's time.

* * *

He had not, in all his careful planning, anticipated needing a co-conspirator quite so small or quite so determined, but Eli had found him in the office one afternoon in late March, sitting at the desk with the ring out of its cloth again, and had asked, with the directness that defined nearly everything he said, what it was.

Adam had considered lying. He had decided, almost immediately, against it.

"It's a ring," he'd said. "For your mom. I'm going to ask her to marry me."

Eli had climbed onto the chair beside the desk to examine it properly, his small face serious with the weight of being entrusted with significant information. "Are those flowers?"

"They're supposed to look like wildflowers. From a field where I first—" Adam had paused, uncertain how much a four-year-old needed of the actual story. "From a field where I fell in love with her."

Eli had looked at the ring for a long moment. Then he had looked up with the particular gleam he got when an idea arrived fully formed. "We should grow some," he'd said. "Real ones. In the garden. So she has the real flowers too, not just the ring ones."

Adam had looked at his son — sharp, generous, entirely unprompted in his kindness — and felt something in his chest do the thing it did more and more often now, the specific ache of being loved by a child who had every reason not to trust him and had decided to anyway.

"That's a perfect idea," he'd said. "Let's keep it a secret until they're ready to bloom."

Eli had nodded gravely, accepting the assignment with the seriousness of a soldier receiving orders, and the two of them had spent the better part of an hour that afternoon researching wildflower varieties online, narrowing the selection with Eli's particular criteria — "ones that are the right colors" and "not the boring kind" — until they'd settled on a mix that would, with luck and proper timing, bloom in time for whatever came after the proposal itself.

It had become, in the weeks since, one of Adam's favorite secrets — not the ring, though that mattered enormously, but the quiet, unprompted way his son had decided, on his own, that the woman they both loved deserved more than just a symbol. She deserved the real thing, growing, alive, planted by hands that loved her.

Adam closed the drawer on the ring and thought, not for the first time, that Eli had inherited something essential from his mother — the instinct to turn love into action rather than letting it stay as feeling alone.