15. Scarlett #2
“Here’s the thing I figured out somewhere between the alley and this dock. You’ve loved me since we were kids. I know that now, I’ve always known it, even when I made myself forget. But that’s not the part that undoes me.”
My breath shakes.
“It’s that you fell in love with me again on the way here.
The version of me that crawled up off your floor and built a trap and walked into a ballroom and took her own life back.
You didn’t just love the girl I used to be.
You stood at my shoulder through the worst of it and you fell for the woman I became while I wasn’t looking.
The old me and the new me. Both. The whole of me.
It’s only ever been me, for you, from the very beginning. ”
“It has.” His voice is wrecked. “Every version. I’d fall for the next one too, if you keep handing me new ones.”
“Then here’s mine.”
I look up at him, clear-eyed, no math running anywhere.
“I love you. I love you, Reid. I’ve loved you longer than I’ve let myself say, and I’m not choosing you because I need you, because I don’t need anyone anymore, I made sure of that.
I’m choosing you because out of every single thing I could build with this free, empty, wide-open life, the one I want most is the one with you in it. ”
For a moment he can’t speak at all. A lifetime of waiting, and here I am, finally choosing him out loud, and I watch it land on him like weather.
He pulls me in and holds me, and I feel both our hearts going at once, two frantic things finally beating in the same place, and over his shoulder a second star blinks on, and then a third, the sky filling itself in by degrees while we stand here, like it’s been waiting for this exact moment to remember how.
When he pulls back, there’s a look on his face I’ve never seen on him. Nervous. So unlike him it takes me a second to place it.
“What?” I say.
“I have a thing for you.” He reaches into his coat. “I’ve been carrying it for weeks. Waiting for a moment that felt big enough. I don’t think one was ever going to come, so this will have to do.”
“Reid.”
“Let me.” He pulls in a breath, and then he lowers himself to one knee on the weathered boards.
The sight of it goes through me like a struck bell, because I have seen Reid Vanderbilt on one knee before, in a quiet room with a stiletto strap twisted around my ankle, threading it through the buckle while I tried to remember how to breathe.
Every man in my life had used me down on the floor. He was the only one who ever knelt to put me back on my feet.
And here he is again. The kneel, come the whole way around.
“Scarlett Ashworth.” His voice holds, though his hands are not quite steady as he opens a small velvet box.
“I’m not going to recite the speech I rehearsed, because it was about how long I waited, and standing here I don’t actually care how long it took.
I only care that you’re here, and you’re free, and you’re looking at me like that. ”
Inside the box, there’s a ring. Not a diamond. An emerald, deep and green and clean-cut, set in a band that catches the new starlight and throws it back.
The color of the gown I tore apart the night this all began. The color of the dress I wore to take myself back. The color of a living thing growing up out of scorched ground.
“I’m not asking you to need me,” he says.
“You’ve spent your whole life being needed, and look what it cost you.
I’m asking for the opposite. Build a life with me that nobody’s leaning on to keep from drowning.
A real one. Two people who choose each other every morning because they want to, not because the books won’t balance otherwise.
” His mouth tips into the smile I stopped pretending I didn’t want weeks ago.
“Marry me, Scarlett. Let’s build a real dynasty. The kind where we write the rules instead of inheriting them.”
The tears are coming now, but I’m laughing through them, the joy too big to hold, spilling out in sounds I didn’t know were in me.
“Only if we burn the rules first,” I tell him.
His whole face breaks open. “Is that a yes?”
“That’s a yes.” I haul him up off the boards and into me. “It’s been a yes for longer than I had the courage to know it.”
He slides the emerald onto my finger, and then he’s kissing me, and the whole sky has come out now, every star it ever owed us hung up there at once, the dark gone soft and crowded with light.
Somewhere back in the city the last embers of my old life are still cooling, and I find I don’t spare them a single thought.
I’m not the small waiting woman from that first gala anymore. Not the invisible wife. Not the erased architect or the daughter who was never enough. I set all of them down on a dock under a sky full of stars, and I step into the rest of my life on my own two bare feet.
Chosen. Choosing. Mine.
***
Later, wrapped in his coat on the deck of his boat with the marina lights swaying gold on the black water, I lean back against him and watch the stars and let myself be, simply and completely, happy.
“What are you thinking?” His arms fold around me from behind, his chin coming to rest on the top of my head.
“About the woman I was a few months ago. Standing in a bathroom with a phone in my hand, certain my whole life was ending.”
“And now?”
I turn in his arms and lay my hand flat against his chest, feeling the warm steady knock of him under my palm.
“Now I know that wasn’t the ending. It was the first true thing that ever happened to me.
Everything I lost, the marriage, the family, the whole self I built to fit inside other people’s needs, I had to lose all of it.
I had to let it burn to find out what was underneath. ”
“And what was underneath?”
“Me.” I rise onto my toes and kiss him, slow and sure. “Just me. Finally allowed to take up the whole room.”
The emerald catches the light as I lower back down, and he looks at it the way some men look at a thing they waited their whole life to be allowed to hold.
“So what now?” he asks. “What does Scarlett Ashworth do with a wide-open life and no debts left to pay?”
I think about it. The investors flooding my phone. The projects I’ve been dreaming and hiding in drawers for years. The vision I buried, the skill I hid, the whole uncharted future stretched out ahead of me like open water I’m finally allowed to sail.
“Whatever she wants,” I say.
And standing on the deck of his boat under a sky that finally kept its promise, his heart beating steady against my hand and an emerald on my finger and not one single debt left to my name, I find, for the first time in my life, that I believe it completely.
THE END