Chapter Thirty-Two Nine Thousand Miles of Yes
The first sign was the phone. Not that Lin Xing hid it, exactly — he wasn’t built for hiding things, not really, not after everything they’d been through.
But he’d started taking calls in the hallway instead of the living room, and twice that week Jennie had walked in to find him ending one abruptly, phone face-down on the counter, wearing the specific composed expression of a man who had rehearsed looking unbothered and gotten most of the way there.
“Who was that?” she asked, on the second occasion.
“A colleague. Scheduling.” He didn’t quite meet her eyes.
“Nothing important.” “You’re a terrible liar.
” “I’m an excellent liar. You’re simply an excellent diagnostician.
” He kissed her forehead to end the conversation, which she noted, privately, as its own kind of confession.
The second sign was Sophia. “So,” Sophia said, cornering her by the supply closet on Wednesday with the barely-contained energy of a woman sitting on a nuclear secret, “anything exciting happening? Anything at all? In your life? Recently?” “...No?” “Nothing? No plans this weekend? Nothing you’re expecting?
” “Sophia, why are you sweating.” “I’m not sweating.
This closet is very warm. It’s a structural issue with the ventilation.
” Sophia backed out of the closet at speed.
“Forget I said anything. I said nothing. This conversation didn’t happen. ”
Emma, when Jennie reported this, only smiled — the warm, knowing, infuriatingly unhelpful smile of a woman who had clearly also been read into whatever this was and had significantly better self control about it than Sophia did.
“You know something too,” Jennie accused.
“I know several things,” Emma agreed serenely. “I’m not telling you any of them.
Eat your lunch.” By Friday, Jennie had stopped asking, mostly because she suspected the asking was the entire game, and she’d rather be surprised properly than talk her way into ruining it early.
She’d learned this much, at least, in a year and a half of loving a careful man: some things he built slowly, in private, and they meant more for having been allowed to finish before anyone saw them.
“Come home a little early tonight,” Lin Xing said that morning, over coffee, with the studied casualness of a man who had clearly practiced the sentence in the mirror.
“I’m making dinner.” “You’re making dinner. Should I be worried about the ceiling?” “The ceiling has recovered from that incident.
I have too, mostly.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Six o’clock. No later.
I mean that.” “Yes, sir,” she said, saluting with her coffee mug, and he rolled his eyes at her in the specific fond way that had taken him the better part of a year to learn how to do.
She walked home from the hospital that evening with an odd, buoyant feeling she couldn’t quite place — the particular anticipation of a day that had been quietly, carefully built toward something, even if she didn’t yet know what.
She knew the second she opened the door.
The apartment was lit low and gold, candles on every flat surface that could safely hold one, the overhead lights off entirely.
On the stove, a small pot of milk sat warming — not yet risen, just beginning its slow climb toward the rim, filling the kitchen with a smell that took her straight back to her very first morning in this building, standing in her pajamas, knocking on a stranger’s door with a prayer she hadn’t meant to share.
The framed photo from Varkala beach had been moved from the hallway to the center of the bookshelf — the slightly crooked one he still, after all this time, refused to accept as charming.
Beside it sat her small white candle, unlit until now, its flame the tallest and steadiest in the room.
And at the piano in the corner — the piano she’d heard through a wall a hundred times before she ever once saw him play it in person — Lin Xing sat with his hands resting on the keys, not yet playing, watching her take it all in with an expression she’d never once seen on him.
Nervous. Genuinely, visibly nervous, in a way that eleven years of composure hadn’t prepared him for.
“You’re early,” she said softly, though it was exactly six.
“You’re exactly on time,” he said. “I may have miscounted my own nerves.”
“Lin. What is this?” He didn’t answer right away.
He turned back to the piano instead, and began to play — not the nocturne she'd first heard through the wall, but something simpler, something with the unmistakable shape of a hymn underneath it, the same one she’d caught him singing under his breath in a pew a lifetime ago.
He played it through once, plainly, without embellishment, the way she imagined his mother must have played it on Sunday mornings before anyone else in the house was awake.
When he finished, he didn’t stand right away either.
He simply looked at her, hands still resting on the keys.
“I called your father seven days ago,” he said.
“I hope you’ll forgive me for going behind your back. I wasn’t certain how else to do this properly.” Jennie’s breath caught. “You called my father.”
“I asked him for his blessing. Properly. In the way I understood mattered to your family, even if I got some of the specifics wrong — I did consult a great many articles beforehand, which he found, in his words, ‘unnecessary but touching.’” A ghost of a smile. “He said yes.
Your mother apparently already knew, before I finished the sentence. She says mothers always know.” “They didn’t tell me anything— ” “I asked them not to. For exactly one week.
I think it was the longest week of your mother’s life.
She’s texted me four times today asking if it’s happened yet.
” He rose from the piano bench, crossed to the small table by the window, and opened his laptop — already set up, already dialed, and before Jennie could fully process what was happening, her parents’ faces filled the screen, both of them crowded into frame, her mother visibly trying not to cry and failing already, her father sitting straighter than she’d ever seen him, wearing his good shirt on what was, for them, the middle of a Saturday night. “Molé,” her mother said, voice thick.
“Don’t look so shocked. You always said God works in strange arrangements.” “Amma—” Jennie pressed a hand to her mouth. “You knew?
This whole time?” “A week is not a long time to keep a secret when the secret is this good,” her father said, and Jennie heard, for the first time in longer than she could remember, real emotion roughening his usually steady voice. “Jennie. He called me.
Properly. Asked permission the old way, like a man raised right, even living all the way in Canada with nobody to teach him.
I told your mother — this one, we don’t need to worry about.
” “Appa—” “I give my blessing,” her father said, simply, directly to the camera, and then, his eyes finding some point just past the screen where Lin Xing must have been standing, “and I give it to you too, son.
Take care of her. She has a big heart. It gets her into trouble sometimes, but it is a very good heart.”
“I intend to spend the rest of my life confirming you’re right about that,” Lin Xing said, quietly, and Jennie’s tears finally spilled over completely.
He crouched down beside her then — not at the laptop, but in front of her, on one knee, on the floor of the apartment that had somehow, gradually, over the better part of two years, become the only place either of them called home.
“Jennie.” His voice, usually so level, wavered on her name.
“I’ve spent most of my life being careful. Careful with grief. Careful with hope. Careful, most of all, with you, because you mattered too much to risk getting wrong.”
He reached into his coat pocket, and produced a small box — not the navy velvet one she remembered buying for herself in Kochi, but a new one, simple and unadorned, the kind a careful man chooses after considerable thought.
“You already wear a promise from me. I meant every part of it. But I find I’d like to make it official, in every sense — not because the promise wasn’t real, but because I’m no longer interested in being careful about how loudly I say so. ”
He opened the box. Inside sat a ring, elegant and understated, exactly the kind of thing she would have chosen for herself if she’d let herself imagine it too clearly.
“You talked to a dinosaur on your first day here and somehow made it good medicine,” he said, voice thick now too, none of his usual precision left in it, only the plain truth underneath.
“You boiled milk in a kitchen you’d lived in for twelve hours and prayed over a man you barely knew.
You gave up an evening you’d planned for months without a second’s hesitation, the moment a child needed you more.
You have made every single day of my life warmer than I knew a day could be, and I would like, very much, to spend the rest of them finding out exactly how much warmer that can get. ” He took a breath. “Jennie.