Chapter 52
The tour was an incredible success both professionally and personally.
Professionally, the book is a huge success, and everyone wants to know what I will write next.
Personally, I got to experience the first part of my tour with Brody by my side, we got to have a taste of being together all day, every day.
.. even at the chaotic pace of the tour.
And then, when Brody left to help his family, I got to prove to myself that I could stand on my own and fight my demons. .. literally.
Coming home, I feel good, tired, but like something feels settled in me.
Chase had picked me up from the airport, saying that he had to head back to the clinic, but he would see me later.
The house was quiet in that way that tells you people were just here.
A mug drying upside down. A dish towel folded but crooked.
The kind of quiet that belongs to a room catching its breath.
“Hello?” I called, half expecting my mother to answer from the kitchen with a plate of something I didn’t ask for but would definitely devour.
No answer. The house was empty in a way it hadn't been in so long.
I moved around, taking in the space with what felt like new eyes and a new appreciation, and that is when I saw it.
A slip of paper waited on the hall table, written in Brody’s writing, which I always thought was prettier than mine.
Meet me at our maple.
My heart did a tidy somersault, and a smile took over my face.
He had said he'd be waiting for me when I got home...
I swapped my flats for boots, the ones that knew the path home and tucked my phone in my back pocket.
The door clicked behind me, and the air met me cool and clean, that almost-winter sharpness that makes everything feel more in focus.
I crossed the yard, passed the garden boxes stripped to their bones, and slid through the gap in the fence like a kid taking the shortcut.
I moved through the trees and open spaces with a feeling of contentment.
The field opened in front of me, our field, gold going gray at the edges, the grass bending in a low breeze.
I’d taken this walk angry once. I’d taken it numb. Today, I just followed my heart. Not away from anything. Toward.
The maple showed itself the way it always did, generous and certain. And then I saw what wasn’t usually there.
At first, it read as two white trailers parked near the pines, but the closer I got, the less temporary they looked.
Fresh trenches cut clean lines in the earth, already filled.
Conduit stood like punctuation marks. A stovepipe rose from one roof, small and stubborn and sure.
The doors were open. Warm lamplight moved across plywood and paint like a promise.
Brody stepped out of the nearer one, brushing sawdust off his shirt with those hands I had missed so much. He looked like he always did when he’d been working, hair a little wild, cheeks a little flushed, something bright under his skin like he was doing exactly what he was meant to do.
“What am I looking at?” I asked, breath fogging the space between us.
He grinned, shy and proud somehow at the same time. “Our now,” he said. “Not just our later.”
He took my hand and tugged me up the steps.
Inside smelled like pine and new beginnings.
A small galley kitchenette hugged one wall: a sink, counter, and a compact stove waiting for its first scorch mark.
Opposite, a tiny table under the window, the kind of spot that turns coffee into a ritual.
Beyond that, a pocket door opened onto a bathroom that made efficiency look cozy.
Hooks already waited for towels. He’d thought of hooks.
He tapped a corner beside the window where a narrow desk had been built into the wall, as if it belonged there.
“For your next book,” he said, almost offhand, and my throat got tight.
“I figured if we wait to live here until everything’s perfect, we’ll be waiting forever.
We can start like this. We can start now. ”
The second trailer was a small living room made from not much that felt like plenty.
A low couch against the far wall. A lamp glowing warm.
A bed tucked in an alcove with crisp sheets that made me want to press my face to them.
The stovepipe I’d seen outside rose from a small pellet stove in the corner, quiet and ready.
“How...” I started and then tried again. “How did you do this so fast?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, sheepishly.
“I didn’t sleep much while you were gone,” he admitted, then winced.
“That sounds weird. I mean, my brain wouldn’t sit still.
So I drew it out, and when everyone was feeling better, they chipped in.
Dad and Mason came by, and your dad pretended he didn’t like helping, but then took over.
My mom fed anyone who touched a hammer. The well’s in.
Septic’s set where the shop will go. Electricity’s running temporarily from my parents’ until we trench our own line. ”
He looked at me like he was waiting for me to tell him he’d gone too far. Like he’d built me a spaceship when I’d asked for a bike.
“Brody,” I said, and my voice went soft without permission. “It’s beautiful. It’s…us.”
He exhaled, some small, tight thing leaving his shoulders. “Yeah?” he asked. “You’re not mad I did all this without asking?”
“I don't think I would have done it this way,” I said. “This is better.”
We stood in the middle of the small room, the two of us plus the hum of something beginning. He reached for my hand and didn’t drop it. His thumb traced that familiar path across the inside of my wrist, a habit that had become a language.
“I thought,” he said, steady now, “maybe we let our land hold our first real beginnings. Not when everything’s finished. Not when it looks like a magazine. Now. While it’s ours and messy.”
“Now,” I echoed, the word settling in my chest like it had finally come home.
He nodded once, like that was the permission he’d been waiting for. Then he swallowed, smile tilting lopsided. “Okay,” he said to himself more than to me. He stepped back just enough to see my face and took both my hands, rough palms warm and sure.
“I had a speech,” he confessed, cheeks going pink, “with metaphors about foundations and beams and how you make everything I build mean something. I can’t remember any of it.”
“You don’t need a speech,” I told him, because he didn’t.
He took a breath. “Cassidy Morgan,” he said, and my name sounded like a vow even before he made one.
“I want every ordinary day with you. I want to fix the hinge twice because your dad says once isn’t good enough.
I want to make coffee at that little table and read whatever you’re writing across from me.
I want to carry in groceries, forget the eggs, and drive back just to do it together.
I want to build our someday, and I don’t want to wait for someday to start. Will you marry me?”
He dropped to one knee right there on the plywood floor. He pulled a small box from his pocket, simple, worn at the edges like he’d carried it for a while, and opened it to a ring that was exactly right: a clean band, a stone that caught the lamp and seemed to hold the light like a secret.
I laughed and cried at once, a sound that felt like a release valve. “Yes,” I said, the word bursting out of me before he could even ask it properly again. “Yes.”
His relief was so bright it made my eyes water. He slid the ring onto my finger with hands that have fixed tractor engines and planed boards and held me together more than once. He stood, and I went up on my toes, and we met in the middle the way we always do.
The door behind us creaked.
“Please tell me she said yes,” Adam stage-whispered, already crying.
I turned, ring flashing, and the trailers filled with people like a tide.
My mother, with her hands to her mouth, his mother with her arms wide and tears spilling like she’d been waiting all day just to let them fall.
My father, pretending he wasn’t wiping his eyes.
Dean with a whoop that made the stovepipe ring.
Clara and Mason, with matching grins. Jackson barreled in, sawdust on his knees, and launched himself at my legs, with Chase following close behind him.
“You’re gonna be my real family for real,” he announced to Brody.
“He was always your family buddy,” I told him, bending to kiss his hair.
“Yeah, but now it’s Official Official,” he said, very seriously, and Brody scooped him up in his arms.
There were hugs from every direction, congratulations layered over jokes layered over instructions no one asked for.
Someone popped a bottle of sparkling cider with the champagne, and someone else produced paper cups.
My mother inspected the desk and said, decisively, “We’ll need a lamp here, maybe some built-in shelves for your notebooks,” as if a committee had assigned her the role.
Dean and my father immediately began an animated discussion about the merits of the pellet stove versus a small wood-burner, while Judy and Clara plotted curtains and our wedding as if they were the same thing.
It was chaotic and warm and exactly how I wanted to start a life: noise softened by love.
Brody never let go of my hand. Even as Chase gave him his best attempt at the big brother talk and Judy insisted on a photo, “First picture in your first place!”, His fingers stayed threaded through mine like a promise.
At some point, the crowd thinned, and my mother threatened to return in the morning with muffins and small appliances.
There were last hugs, last jokes through the door, last admonitions to sleep and eat, and call if the heat does anything weird.
The dusk deepened to almost night. Quiet gathered all around us.