Chapter 36
Levi
Afew months after the fire, Sweetbriar finally exhaled.
The Carver Group’s empire had begun to crumble in slow, public pieces.
The attorney general’s press conference had gone statewide.
The words “systemic fraud” and “predatory acquisition” were now attached to their name in every major Oregon outlet.
Court filings kept unsealing like dominoes—subsidiary after subsidiary.
Aggie had given exactly one interview, called herself “retired and extremely motivated,” and the six o’clock news had replayed her no-nonsense smile for a week straight.
The recall petition against Mayor Whitaker had quietly gathered enough signatures that he announced he wouldn’t seek re-election “for family reasons.” Nobody bought it, but nobody needed to. The town had already moved on.
Travis was gone too. The fire marshal’s report cited the cigarette butt thirty feet from the ignition point as the presumed cause of the fire.
His attorney called it “careless disposal during a walk.” Matt just shook his head and said the rest was now a problem for prosecutors.
Travis’s community-outreach job vanished with Whitaker’s political future, and without it, there was nothing left to hold him here.
He packed up one weekend and left without a goodbye.
The town gossip finally shifted to something softer—weddings, babies, who was bringing what to the next knitting night.
Becca and I had settled into something that felt permanent.
We’d bought a new trailer together. It was nothing like her old one, which wasn’t saying much, considering the old one had leaked, listed to the left, and housed a coffee maker with a forty percent success rate.
This one was solid and clean, with windows that actually sealed and a kitchen that didn’t require creative workarounds.
My parents’ trailer was back at their place.
People had asked, when we’d made the decision, why we were staying at the park.
We were both working, both saving. We could have looked at rentals in town, something with a proper foundation.
Some people seemed to expect that. Like the campground was a temporary situation we’d naturally graduate out of once things got serious between us.
But that wasn’t how either of us felt about it, and I didn’t know how to explain that to someone who hadn’t spent enough time here to understand what the place actually was.
This was where I’d come looking for her, that first night, when I’d driven down the gravel road not entirely sure what I was going to say.
This was where she’d built something quiet and hers after finally leaving Travis for good.
This was where Aggie had fed us both, and Gerald had decided I was tolerable, and the river had provided a kind of background constancy that I hadn’t known I needed until it was just always there.
We’d fallen in love twenty feet from where we now slept.
The ground here held that. I wasn’t ready to walk away from it, and neither was Becca.
And there was the community of it—the people who’d shown up the night of the fire, the way everyone here knew everyone else’s business and used that knowledge kindly.
You didn’t find that in a rental on Birch Street.
You couldn’t manufacture it. It had to grow over time, and it had grown here, and we were part of it now in a way that felt real and chosen and worth protecting.
So we stayed. We bought a new trailer, faced it toward the river, and made it ours.
And we were saving—quietly, steadily, in a separate account we both put into each month—for a house someday.
Something with a yard, maybe. A porch. Becca had mentioned a garden once, offhand, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to want it yet, and I’d thought about that a lot since. We’d get there. We had time.
But for now, walking back from Aggie’s and seeing our light on inside. Waking up to the sound of the river and Becca’s weight on the mattress beside me was enough. It was everything, actually.
Aggie’s new Airstream was gleaming and unblemished, already decorated in a way that suggested she’d been planning the aesthetic before the insurance check cleared. Christmas lights along the awning. A new floral doormat. A ceramic planter with something purple and tenacious growing in it.
Gerald occupied the step with the same sovereign authority he’d maintained at the old one, as though the fire had been a minor inconvenience. The only difference in him was that he seemed to be almost as in love with Becca as I was.
Becca was still podcasting, but now she used her real name on it, her real voice. And I was beyond proud of her.
The evening I suggested a walk, I didn’t let myself overthink it.
I’d carried the small velvet box in my jacket pocket for weeks.
I’d been waiting for the perfect moment—after the town meeting, after the river at dusk, after every quiet night we’d shared—and finally realized there was no perfect moment.
There was only this one, with her. She took the jacket I offered without question, the easy trust of someone who had already decided I was the one.
We walked the long loop around the campground, the way we used to when we were kids, and everything felt possible. The river ran low and clear, catching the last gold light and throwing it back in quiet sparks. When we reached the water’s edge, I stopped.
She turned to me, curious but calm, the wind lifting a strand of hair across her cheek.
I took both her hands in mine.
“Becca,” I said, voice low, “I’ve loved you for a long time. Longer than you know.”
Her eyes widened slightly, but she stayed quiet, letting me speak.
“I meant it the first time I asked you—drunk and clumsy in that parking lot. I meant it when we were twelve, eating peanut-butter sandwiches in the library. I meant it through every year we spent drifting apart, through every time you pushed me away because you thought you weren’t enough, through every night I lay awake wondering if I’d waited too long to try and get close to you again.
I meant it through Travis, through the fire, through that first moment when you let me climb through your window and hold you until you could breathe again. ”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the box.
The ring was simple, a single round solitaire, one full carat, set on a thin platinum band that caught the river light and held it like a secret. No flash. Just perfect, sparkling beauty.
“I want to wake up every morning to the sound of this river and you breathing beside me. I want to be the one you reach for in the dark. I want to build whatever comes next with you—podcast episodes, Sunday dinners, babies, whatever life decides to hand us. I want to spend the rest of my life proving that you were always enough. You’ve always been everything. ”
I dropped to one knee on the damp riverbank, the ring held between us like a promise. “Rebecca Lynn Hartford, will you marry me?”
She stood perfectly still for one heartbeat, two, the gold light trembling in her eyes. Then a soft smile unfurled across her face, lighting her up brighter than the sunset.
“Yes,” she whispered. Then again, stronger, laughing through happy tears. “Yes, Levi. God, yes.”
I rose, took her left hand, and slid the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly. The stone caught the last pink edge of the sky and shimmered warm against her skin, simple and beautiful.
She stared at it for a long moment, thumb brushing the band like she still couldn’t believe it was real.
I cupped her face with both hands and kissed her while the river sang behind us and the pines stood witness.
Aggie’s door opened before we made it across the lot.
She appeared in the frame with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had absolutely not been watching through the window, backlit by the warm light inside, a cup of something steaming in her hand.
She looked at us. She looked at Becca’s left hand with the ring glinting in the light. “Well,” she called out, voice carrying across the gravel with pure delight. “Finally!”
Becca laughed, the sound startled and happy.
Aggie raised her mug in salute. “Congratulations, you two. About damn time.”
I felt a grin pull at the corners of my mouth. “Thanks, Aggie.”
She waved us off with the mug. “Go on. Enjoy your night. I’ll see you in the morning for coffee so I can properly admire that ring.”
Becca’s eyes widened. “Love you, Aggie.”
“Love you too, sweetheart.” She laughed and disappeared back inside, the door closing with a soft click.
We walked the last stretch to our trailer in silence, hands linked, the ring cool and certain against my palm.
I opened the door.
She stepped inside first.
The small living space smelled like her laundry soap and the faint trace of the lavender candle she liked to burn when she was recording.
My jacket hung on the hook by the door. Her recording setup lived on the folding table by the window, facing the tree line.
The bed was made with the quilt Aggie had given us—blue and white, the kind of thing that felt like home the second you touched it.
She stood in the middle of the room for a moment, looking at it all like she was seeing it for the first time.
I closed the door behind us with a soft click.
She turned, eyes shining in the warm lamplight, cheeks still flushed from the river air and the weight of everything we’d just said yes to.
I stepped into her space slowly, hands finding her waist, pulling her close until our bodies met in that familiar, perfect way. “We’re home,” I murmured against her mouth.
She kissed me first, like she was tasting the word yes all over again. Her hands slid up my chest, fingers curling into my shirt. “Home,” she echoed softly against my lips, smiling into the kiss. “I like the sound of that.”