CHOSEN LAST (Hartsong #1)

Chapter Thirty-One

Beth

I chose him at the willow, in the end. The same willow.

We'd been careful about that spot all spring and into the summer—the bend in the river downstream from the old boat launch, where the big willow trails its branches in the water, where he'd gotten down on one knee a lifetime and a heartbreak ago and I'd said yes to a man who hadn't yet learned how to choose me.

We'd walked the riverwalk a hundred times by then and he had never once steered us toward it.

Never tried to reclaim it, never let his eyes go soft in its direction, just let it sit there downstream, a place we hadn't gotten to, the way you leave a door closed in a house where someone died.

So it had to be me who took us there. That was the entire point, the thing my whole bruised heart had decided on without quite telling me.

After a lifetime of being chosen last—of arranging myself around other people's choosing, of waiting to be picked and calling the waiting love—I was going to be the one who did the choosing, out loud, with my own mouth, in the one place I'd only ever been the one who got chosen.

I took his hand on a gold evening in late July. "Walk down to the willow with me."

I felt him go still beside me. He knew the spot; of course he knew it. "Beth—"

"Just walk with me. Okay?"

A long beat. Then, low: "Okay." And he came.

? ? ?

We stood under it with the water going gold through the trailing branches, the same light, the same river, both of us a year older and a whole life heavier.

My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my throat.

I want to be honest about that, because I think people imagine that the person doing the choosing is the one in power, the calm one, and it isn't true at all.

I was terrified. I had been broken once standing close to this man, broken so thoroughly it took a whole winter alone to find all the pieces, and every animal instinct I had was screaming that to choose him again was to hand him the hammer back.

Choosing isn't the safe position. Choosing is the most exposed thing there is. You can't do it with your arms up.

"You proposed to me here," I said.

"I know." His voice was careful, watchful, a man who'd learned not to assume the shape of a thing before it finished happening.

"I think about it every time we walk past. I never wanted to—if it was ever going to mean anything again, it couldn't be me dragging us back to it.

It had to be yours, or it wasn't worth anything. "

"It is mine. That's why we're here." I turned to face him under the branches.

"I'm going to say some things. And I need you to let me get through them, the way you did at the restaurant.

But I also need you to—be in it with me.

Not just stand there taking it. Okay? I don't want to talk at you.

I'm so tired of one of us talking at the other. "

Something moved in his face. "Okay," he said. "I'm in it. I'm right here."

I took a breath. The river moved. Somewhere upstream a red-winged blackbird ran its rusty hinge of a song, over and over, like it couldn't get the note quite right and wouldn't stop trying.

"When you proposed to me here," I said, "I said yes to a man I loved who didn't know how to put me first. And then I spent two years making myself smaller and smaller to fit at a table, and calling it love, calling it being good—"

"It wasn't your job to get smaller." He said it quietly but he said it, stepping into the gap I'd left, exactly the way I'd asked him to. "I should've been making room. That was mine to do. I let you do the shrinking because it was easier than—"

"I know. Let me—" But I reached out and put my hand flat on his chest when I said it, so he'd know I wasn't shutting him out, just keeping my footing.

"I know it was yours. I'm getting there.

" I felt his heart going under my palm, as hard as mine.

That steadied me somehow—that he was scared too.

"The thing I had to learn, in the wreckage, the thing it took the whole winter alone to learn, is that I'd been letting myself be chosen last my entire life.

Since I was the surprise baby in a house full of grown-ups.

The late one. The one who had to be a little bit easier to keep than everybody else, a little less trouble, or what was the point of me.

" My voice cracked and I let it. "I learned I would genuinely rather be alone for the rest of my life than be one more person's afterthought.

I mean that all the way down, Alonzo. I built my whole self back around it this winter, brick by brick, by myself.

That part is not negotiable, not for you, not for anybody. "

He didn't rush to fill it. He just nodded, his throat working, and said, rough, "Good. It shouldn't be. I'd never want you to set that down. Not even for me. Especially not for me."

"And here's the part that took me longest." I had to steady my voice.

"I could've had safe. I had a safe door standing wide open all spring—a good, kind man who'd never once have made me feel like too much, who'd have given me a warm easy life and never broken a single thing.

And I closed it. Myself. Because somewhere this year I figured out I don't want safe.

I don't want the woodstove. I want—" The word stuck and I made myself say it anyway, here, to his face, in the gold light.

"I want the fire. I want the one who actually sets me alight.

As long as—God help me—as long as he's finally a man who'll choose me first while he does it.

And that's the whole of what I couldn't have before, isn't it.

I had the fire. I just never once had the choosing to go with it. "

His eyes had gone bright and wet. "Beth." Just my name, like he didn't trust himself with anything bigger yet.

"I've watched you for a year," I said. "The slow kind of watching.

The real kind. I watched you tell the whole town the worst thing about yourself to clear my name and ask nothing back.

I watched you write me a letter that let me go, and mean it, which is the single hardest thing you've ever done and the only thing that ever could've made me walk back toward you.

I watched you choose me over your own family's emergency on the biggest day of my career, and watched your family choose me right alongside you.

" I was crying now, the quiet kind, not bothering to stop it.

"I've watched you on a hundred ordinary Tuesdays now, Alonzo.

The unglamorous ones. The ones with no flood to be the hero of, no crisis, no audience.

And the man holds. You're not just sorry in the wreckage anymore.

You're different in the ordinary. That's the only thing I ever needed from you and the only thing I never got—and you went away and quietly became it, with no promise that I'd ever be standing here to see. "

"I didn't become it for this." He said it fast, like it mattered more than anything, like he had to get it in before I gave him too much credit.

"I need you to know that. I'd have kept being it even if you'd married somebody else.

I didn't fix myself to win you back—I tried to, at first, I won't lie, but somewhere this winter it stopped being about you and started being about just—not wanting to be the man who did that to somebody.

Ever again. To anybody." His voice broke clean through.

"So whatever you're about to say, don't say it because you think I earned it.

I can't—Beth, I can't take it if it's a prize. I'm done with you being a prize."

And that—I can't take it if it's a prize—was how I knew, finally, all the way down, that the year had been real.

The old Alonzo would have grabbed anything I offered with both hands and never once asked whether it was good for me.

This one was standing at the edge of the only thing he wanted in the world and checking whether I was giving it from the right place first.

"It's not a prize." I reached into my pocket.

I'd asked him for it the week before—the ring.

The one I'd pressed back into his hand in a parking lot in the fall with my whole body shaking.

I'd had a guess he'd kept it, and I'd been right; he'd never been able to make himself get rid of it, he told me, his ears going red, it had sat in a drawer at his parents' house for a year being the most expensive paperweight in Hartsong.

I'd asked, and he'd handed it over without a single question, leaving even that up to me.

I held it out in my open palm, in the gold light.

"This time," I said, and my voice only shook a little, "I'm choosing you.

Not waiting to be chosen. Not being picked once everybody else has had their turn.

I'm doing the choosing, with my eyes all the way open, knowing exactly what you cost me and exactly who you've become, from strength, on my terms. I'm choosing you, Alonzo Vargas.

First. On purpose. The way I always, always wanted to be chosen and never was.

" My hand was trembling around the ring and I let it.

"And I'm not asking you to marry me tomorrow.

I want us to do it right, slow, the way we've been doing it—I'm not handing you back two years and a wall coming down all in one night, I don't have it in me and I shouldn't.

But I'm telling you the wall's coming down.

I'm telling you it's you. It was always you—but now it's you on the truth, in the open, instead of you on me disappearing.

" I pressed the ring into his palm and closed his fingers over it with both my hands.

"So you hold onto this. And when I'm ready—and I'll know, I promise you I'll know—you put it back on me.

And I'll wear it knowing for certain I'm the first thing you choose and not the last. Deal? "

For a second he couldn't speak at all. I watched him try and fail twice, his fist closed white around the ring and pressed hard against his own sternum like he was trying to hold it inside his ribs.

"Beth," he finally managed, completely wrecked.

"I would wait the rest of my life for you to be ready.

Ten years. Twenty. I'd wait and never once make you feel the waiting.

" A breath that was half a sob and half a laugh breaking open at the same time.

"And the second you are—the very second—I will choose you first, out loud, in front of God and Verna Pinch and everybody, every single day, until we're old and boring and the whole town's sick to death of how disgusting we are about each other.

" He pressed his forehead down against mine, the ring still trapped in his fist between us. "Deal. God, yes. Deal."

And then—only then, with the choice made, and mine, and clear in the gold light, with nothing left hidden underneath it—I kissed him.

Under the willow where it all began. The same place, two different people, the river running gold around us, and a year of grief and work behind us, and his hands coming up to my face like I was the answer to a question he'd stopped letting himself ask.

It was the first time we'd kissed in over a year that didn't have a single thing hiding beneath it.

No fear, no wall, no two-years' worth of swallowed words.

Just the truth. Just us. Just me, choosing him, first, finally, with my whole open heart and my eyes wide open and my feet planted in the one spot on earth I'd been most afraid to stand.

? ? ?

The town knew within the day. The town always knows within the day.

And the strange thing—the thing that finally closed the whole long circle—was that the same gossip mill that had ground me to powder in the autumn now narrated our willow evening like it was the great romance of the decade.

Sherry Dukes posted something tearful in the Buzz.

Verna Pinch told three separate people she'd always known we'd find our way back, which was a lie, but by then I'd made a kind of peace with the small lies this town tells to make itself the hero of its own story.

The same shallow well that had blessed Lola and buried me had swung all the way around, and now it warmed me, and I let it, because I'd learned that a small town's love is a fickle and powerful weather and you might as well stand in the sun of it when it finally turns your way.

Carmen took the longest, which I loved her for more than I could say.

She'd watched them destroy me, and she was not about to hand him her blessing at any discount.

"I'm watching him," she told me over coffee, eyes narrowed to slits.

"Forever, Beth. One bad Tuesday—one—and I will end that man.

I have a key to your shop and I know where he sleeps and I have access to a great deal of floral wire. "

"I know you do."

"I'm dead serious."

"I know you are. That's why I love you." I smiled at her over my cup. "Now drink your coffee."

She drank her coffee. And then, grudging, looking out the window at the street like it had personally wronged her: "He did stand up in front of the whole town for you, though.

I'll give him that one thing. That took something real.

" A long pause, the longest concession Carmen Delgado has ever made in her natural life.

"He's not the worst." And after the year we'd had, he's not the worst, from Carmen, was very nearly a toast at a wedding.

I went home that night to Nana Ruth's throw—except I didn't curl up alone underneath it the way I had all the long gray winter.

I sat out on my own porch in the warm dark, with the peonies blooming in the garden I'd dug with my own two hands, in the life I'd built by myself before any of them and rebuilt by myself when it shattered, and I felt something I had to sit very still to even recognize.

Chosen. By my own self, first of all and most of all. I'd chosen my own life, my own shop, my own strength, my own terms, and I'd held the line on every one of them right down to the willow.

And then, from inside all that—freely, with my eyes open, terrified and steady at the same time—I had chosen him.

It had taken nearly losing everything to learn the difference between the two.

But I was nobody's afterthought now. I had said so out loud, in the gold light, in the one place I'd been most afraid to stand, and I had meant it with my whole body, and I would never be anybody's afterthought again as long as I lived.

The peonies nodded in the dark. The river ran gold, somewhere downstream, under the willow that was ours again now.

I'd done the choosing.

It turned out that was the only thing I had ever wanted—not to be chosen, in the end, but to be a woman who got to choose.