Chapter Forty-Eight
brEANNA
HE ASKED me to walk down to the stream with him after all the presents had been opened and the kids were busy with their toys.
The crisp air is icy on my face, and the frost is making the grass crunch under our feet.
The bright orange rays of the early sun are breaking through the trees and making everything sparkle.
But I know this place in every kind of light.
I knew it at seventeen with the entire summer ahead of us and his hands in my hair.
I knew it the night I came down here in the cold and told him I was broken, and that I'd never give him the thing he was supposed to want.
I don't know why my heart started going faster when he laced his fingers through mine and led me down the slope through the dead grass.
The water is flowing slow, and lazy, reflecting the early light.
He stops at the edge of it, where the bank flattens out, close to the rock where our souls and bodies first came together, and turns me to face him.
The sun is just high enough to light up one side of his face and make that eye a light coffee color.
"You remember what you told me down here," he said. It wasn't a question.
My mind flips through the hundreds of moments we’ve spent at this bank, and I take a deep breath. “That’s a loaded question, you’ll have to be more specific.”
His thumbs move over my knuckles. “You said you’d never be able to trust that you wouldn't wake up one day and I'd be gone.”
Sucking in a breath, I think of the night I told him about not being able to give him children. Then I remember what I said: I’ll never survive you leaving me again. I can't imagine a more horrible life than living with that cloud of fear over my head.
It was meant to push him away. I drop my eyes to the front of his thermal shirt. “Mato…”
He interrupts me and squeezes my fingers between his. "I've been thinking about how to fix that since the second you said it. I can't, really. Anyone can say, ‘I'll stay’. I already said it once, when we were kids, and then I left, so my word's not worth much down here, is it. Not at this spot."
I look up at him. The sunlight caught in his dark eyes.
"But I figured something out," he smiles.
"The leaving wasn’t the worst part. You told me that.
It was the silence after. Ten years when you didn't know where I was or what I was thinking or whether you crossed my mind.
I made you live inside that silence, and that's the thing I can never give you back. "
My throat has gone tight.
"So here's what I've got." He lets go of my hand and reaches into his pocket. When he goes down on one knee in the dead grass at the edge of the water, the entire world tips sideways and goes very quiet and very loud at the same time. The diamonds in the ring catch the sun’s rays and sparkle even brighter than the frost.
"I'm not going to promise you I'll never leave," he says, and his voice isn't steady anymore.
“Because I promised you that once, and I want you to believe me this time.
So I'm promising you something else. I'm promising you'll never wonder again.
You'll never have to guess where I am, or what I'm feeling, or whether I'm thinking about you, because I'm going to tell you.
Every day. Out loud. For the rest of my life, you will never live in the silence again.
" His chest moves. “I already wrote you ten years of letters you never got. Let me say the rest of them to your face. Marry me, nudo. Please.”
I started crying before he finished. I get down on my knees too, in the frozen grass. "Yes," I say. It comes out on a sob and sounds like a croak. "Yes. Out loud. Every day. Yes."
When he kisses me, he makes a sound against my lips: Relief? Happiness? Something more?
The ring is cold when he first slips it on my finger, and then his hands are on either side of my face like I might float off if he doesn't hold me down. I’m so happy I might.
Whoops and whistles echo across the yard from the house, and we turn to see we have an audience. My entire family is on the porch watching. We look back at each other and laugh.
“Merry Christmas, nudo.”
“Merry Christmas.”