Epilogue
mia
One year later
"You are making coffee," I say, not opening my eyes yet, "not defending a championship."
"Both require precision."
"Coffee does not require telemetry."
"That is exactly the kind of assumption people make immediately before they ruin it."
The pen sits in the mug on the counter where it's lived for months now. The pen had stopped being evidence of what he'd once decided without me. It was simply where it lived now.
I let myself listen to the whole ratio speech. There's nowhere else I need to be.
I have a call that morning — a board chair who wants to issue a defensive statement before anyone's told the family member it actually concerns.
"Do you need silence, coffee, or a second set of eyes," Seb asks, before I sit down.
"Silence."
"Understood."
He leaves without adding advice, without hovering, without so much as glancing at my screen on his way out.
"No," I tell the chair, twenty minutes later. "A holding line is not a denial. It's time. Use it to call his daughter before someone else hands her a version of her father's exit she never asked for."
When I emerge, Seb doesn’t ask whether I won.
“How did it go?” he asks instead.
“I stopped a board chair from turning panic into a press release.”
“That’s all you have?”
“You were right not to ask whether it went well. I don’t think I can improve on that.”
Priya texts that afternoon, the timing she's perfected over a decade of knowing exactly when I'll actually answer.
Report.
Nothing to report. Coffee. Seb explained ratios. I stopped a board chair from embarrassing himself.
That is, unfortunately, a complete report. A pause, longer than her usual rhythm. I think you're actually fine, Mia.
That sounds disappointed.
It sounds disgusted. You're boring now. In the healthiest possible way.
That's almost sentimental, Priya.
Don't get used to it. Then: I'm glad you picked up that phone, that morning.
I look toward the kitchen, where Seb's narrating something to the kettle now, entirely unaware anyone's watching.
So am I, I type back.
He's working at the table when I come back through, the stakeholder map for a new client spread across half of it.
"Do you need the table clear," he asks, "or are you still using the map?"
"Still using it."
"Then I'll set dinner around it."
He does, exactly that, two plates fitted into the gaps between client documents without a single complaint about the chaos, and I find myself watching him do it longer than the task requires.
I go to the desk, get a single folded page, and bring it back to the kitchen.
"That looks dangerous," he says, eyeing it.
"It's a document."
"I've learned that documents involving you require caution."
"This one requires honesty."
I hand it to him. At the top, in my own handwriting: THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY.
Beneath it:
We ask before we decide.
We say difficult things while they still have time to matter.
We come home when we can.
We choose each other in daylight.
And at the bottom: Will you marry me?
He reads it twice, and when he looks up there's nothing uncertain in his face — just the particular stillness of a man absorbing something too large to answer carelessly.
" Thirty-seven documents once made me responsible for the worst day of your life," I say. "This one's for all the days after."
"You wrote terms."
"I wrote what I understand."
"You understand me better than anyone has a right to."
"I understand enough to know I want this." I watch him fold the page carefully, like something worth keeping. "You're allowed to answer any time now."
"I'm trying to find words large enough for it. Give me a moment."
"Take your moment. I'm not going anywhere."
"Then why are you asking," he says, finally, "instead of simply telling me what you've already decided."
"Because a piece of paper can't make us safe. I'm not asking for safety. I'm asking because I know exactly who I want beside me when nothing needs saving."
He doesn't answer in words. He reaches into the kitchen drawer — the one where we keep takeaway menus and spare keys — and produces a small box I have never once seen before.
"You bought a ring."
"Months ago. I asked Priya for the size, after telling her I wouldn't bring it anywhere near you until the question was yours too." He sets the page down carefully, beside the stakeholder map I wasn't asked to move. "You chose the page. Let me choose the question."
He gets down on one knee, in my kitchen, in a jumper that's technically mine.
" Mia Callahan, will you marry me? Not because I need you to authorize my life. Not because I need you to save me from it. Because I want to spend the rest of it meeting you in the middle."
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes to the difficult version. The late flights. The bad races. The impossible client calls. The coffee ratios. All of you."
He slides the ring onto my finger, and it fits, easily, the way something does when someone's actually asked the right person for help instead of guessing alone.
Six weeks later, at a registry office in London, there are no cameras, no sponsors, no press releases, and no one who hasn't been specifically asked to be there.
"You could have eloped," Priya whispers, smoothing her dress. "You did not need to make me buy proper shoes."
"You own proper shoes."
"I own shoes that have ambitions. Different category."
Matteo notices the pen, sitting on the registrar's table beside the certificate, brought along because I refused to sign with anything else.
"That's the pen," he says.
Seb glances at it. "Yes."
"It matters?"
"It matters," Seb says, and doesn't elaborate, and Matteo, who has known him for eleven years, doesn't need him to.
Elena's face fills the small screen propped against the registrar's lamp, narrating opinions about the proceedings in two languages at once, audibly delighted by all of it.
The registrar asks if Seb takes me.
He looks at me, not her. "I do. In daylight."
Priya makes a sound she'll later deny making. Matteo studies the ceiling with sudden, profound interest. Elena, on screen, has stopped pretending she isn't crying.
The registrar asks if I take him.
"I do," I say. "With full information."
I sign first. Seb watches me do it — not the registrar, not the witnesses, only me — and signs beside me a moment later, the ink still wet when he takes my hand.
Outside, London keeps moving around us — buses, rain on the pavement, strangers hurrying toward emergencies that have nothing to do with us.
At 7:14, he had needed my signature.
Now he only wanted my hand.
***
Thank you for reading Ask Me First.