Chapter Forty Six

Jules' POV

I was recovering from a cold — nothing serious, just the particular sluggish misery of a head full of pressure and a body that wanted only to stay horizontal — when Adam brought me coffee in bed on a Saturday morning in early April, which was not in itself unusual, except that he sat down on the edge of the mattress instead of handing me the mug and leaving, and something in the careful way he settled there told me this was not going to be an ordinary morning.

Eli was downstairs with Madeline, watching cartoons with the particular devotion he reserved for Saturday mornings. The house was quiet in the way houses are quiet when everyone in them has somewhere specific to be except the two people in the room you're in.

Adam held the coffee but didn't hand it over yet.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Better. Still a little fuzzy." I pushed myself up against the pillows, hair a disaster, nose pink from a week of tissues, in absolutely no condition for whatever was clearly about to happen. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're about to say something important and you're nervous about it."

He huffed a small laugh, caught. He set the coffee on the nightstand, untouched. He reached into the pocket of his sweater — he was still in pajama pants and the soft gray sweater he wore on weekend mornings, nothing formal about any of it, which I would understand the significance of only later — and he took something out, and he didn't get down on one knee, didn't make a production of it, just held it out to me on his open palm.

A ring. Small, irregular stones clustered together like wildflowers, the gold around them weathered and warm rather than polished and cold.

I stared at it. I did not say anything because I did not have anything to say. My head, which had been thick with cold medicine and the general fog of being sick, went suddenly, completely clear.

"I know you don't need this," Adam said, his voice low and steady, the careful, unhurried voice he used when something mattered too much to risk rushing. "I know you've survived everything — everything — without me, and you would survive whatever comes next without me too, because you are the strongest person I have ever known, and I am aware that I am the reason you had to be."

I opened my mouth. He kept going, gently, before I could interrupt.

"I know I was the worst mistake of your life," he said. "I know that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because it's an uncomfortable thing to say while holding out a ring. But I also know — and I need you to hear this part too — that I am the luckiest man alive, because somehow, against every reasonable thing the universe should have allowed, you let me back in. You let me be there for Eli. You let me earn it, slowly, one Tuesday and one Saturday at a time, and you never once let me skip the work of actually deserving it."

My eyes were burning. I pressed my lips together.

"I'm asking anyway," he said. "Knowing all of that. Knowing I don't deserve an easy yes. I'm asking because I want to spend the rest of my life making sure the answer stays yes, every single day, in every small way, for as long as you'll let me."

I looked at the ring. At the wildflowers caught in gold, weathered like something that had grown there rather than been made.

"Where did you find that?" I asked, because it was the only sentence I could locate in the enormous tangle of everything I was feeling.

"I described the fields," he said. "The night before it rained. The night of our first kiss. I described what they looked like, the exact color of the light, and I asked a jeweler to make something that looked like that. Like it grew there instead of being built."

I looked at it for a long moment. I thought about the loft. The rain. The fireworks. All the moments folded into each other across years and grief and three thousand miles of running and coming back.

I held out my hand.

He slid the ring onto my finger with hands that were not entirely steady, which undid me more than anything he'd said, because Adam Casey's hands were never unsteady, not in boardrooms, not in crises, not standing in burning hallways.

They were unsteady now.

"Is that a yes?" he asked.

I looked at the ring on my hand. I looked at him — at this man who had broken everything and then spent every single day since trying to rebuild it more carefully than it had ever been built the first time.

"Ask me something harder," I said.

He laughed — really laughed, the unguarded one, relief and joy tangled together — and pulled me into his arms, careful of my cold, careful of everything, the way he was careful of everything now.

* * *

Eli found us five minutes later, drawn upstairs by some instinct children have for the moments that matter, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at the ring on my hand, which I was still staring at, and he made a sound like a small explosion and launched himself onto the bed and into the middle of both of us, demanding details with the urgency of someone who had clearly been hoping for this development for some time.

"Are you getting married?" he said. "Are you actually getting married? Can I be in it? Can Victor be in it?"

"Victor is a cat," Adam said.

"He could carry the rings on his back."

"We'll discuss it," I said, laughing, my face wet, my heart entirely, completely full.

Eli settled between us with the satisfaction of someone whose worldview had just been confirmed, and Adam looked at me over the top of our son's head with an expression that needed no further words, and outside the window the April light was doing something extraordinary across the lake, gold going to silver as the morning settled in.

I looked at the ring on my hand. Wildflowers, caught forever in gold.

I thought: I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.

* * *

We called Madeline first — she had been at the grocery store and answered already half-shrieking, having apparently sensed something through whatever mysterious channel best friends used to detect major life events from a distance, and her reaction when I confirmed it was loud enough that Adam had to hold the phone slightly away from his ear, laughing.

We called Dorian next. He answered on the second ring, his voice carrying its usual measured calm until I told him, and then something in it cracked open in a way I'd rarely heard.

"Julia," he said, and stopped. I heard him breathe, gathering himself. "I am so happy for you. I cannot tell you how happy."

"Will you walk me down the aisle?" I asked, the question arriving before I'd fully planned to ask it, but it felt right, urgent even, like something that needed to be settled immediately rather than waiting for some more formal occasion.

The silence on the line stretched for a long moment.

"It would be the greatest honor of my life," Dorian said finally, his voice rough.

I hung up and looked at Adam, who had been watching me with the soft, complete attention he gave to everything that mattered now, and I felt the full weight of the morning settle into something solid and permanent — not just the engagement itself, but the family gathering around it, every call confirming what I'd somehow always hoped but rarely let myself believe: that I was not building this alone, that I had never really been building any of it alone, not since the moment Madeline opened her apartment door to a stranger with two duffel bags and a baby on the way.

Eli, still nestled between us, looked up at the ring on my hand one more time. "Can I tell my teacher tomorrow?" he asked. "At circle time?"

"You can tell anyone you want," I said, laughing through the last of my tears.

"Good," he said, satisfied, already planning his announcement. "Because I'm going to tell everyone."