Chapter Fifty-Two A Question at the Waters Edge
They stayed one more night than planned, neither of them willing to be the first to suggest returning to the city, and on that final evening, Dante led her down to the end of the dock just as the sun began its slow descent into the lake, gold light scattering across the water like something spilled and precious.
"I had a whole speech prepared," he admitted, and for the first time since she'd known him, Elena watched Dante Moretti — a man who negotiated with killers without his pulse changing — look genuinely, helplessly nervous.
"I wrote it three times. I burned all three attempts, because none of them said what I actually meant. "
"What do you actually mean?"
He reached into his pocket and drew out a small velvet box, worn soft at the corners as though he'd been carrying it for weeks, waiting for the right moment.
Inside sat not the elaborate diamond Elena might have expected from a man of his wealth, but something simpler — a slim band set with a single pale sapphire, the color, she realized with a catch in her throat, of a winter sky.
"We already did this the wrong way around," he said, low and rough.
"A courthouse of strangers, a debt instead of a proposal, vows exchanged before either of us had chosen the other freely.
I wanted, before we go back to that life, to ask you properly.
Not because you have to say yes. Because I want you to have said it, once, with nothing but love standing between the question and the answer. "
Elena's eyes had gone bright, her hand pressed to her mouth.
"Elena Rossi." His voice shook, just slightly, on her name — her real name, the one that had existed before Moretti, before the debt, before any of it.
"I didn't choose you well, the first time.
I chose you like a transaction, and I have spent every day since trying to earn the right to choose you properly.
So I'm asking now, freely, with nothing owed and nothing threatened: will you marry me?
Not the Don. Just Dante. For exactly as long as you'll let me stay. "
"We're already married," she managed, half-laughing, half-crying.
"I know." His smile was unsteady, achingly sincere. "I don't care. I want to hear you say yes to this version of it. The one that isn't a debt."
"Yes," she said, and the word came out on a sob of pure happiness, her hands shaking as he slid the ring onto her finger beside the one he'd given her at the courthouse months ago. "Yes, Dante, of course, yes—"
He kissed her there at the water's edge, the sun sinking gold and orange into the lake around them, and for a long moment neither of them heard anything at all except the quiet lap of water against the dock and the sound of their own held breath finally releasing into something like relief.
"I have loved you since a photograph of you laughing on a sidewalk," he murmured against her mouth, echoing words he'd said once before, in the dark of their wedding night, "and I intend to keep proving it to you, in small ways, for the rest of my life."