16. Home Ground #2
Star fruit tree in the corner he planted the year I was born. Jasmine climbing the back wall because my mother wanted it there and he built her a trellis without being asked.
Beyond the jasmine wall, the pool catches the last of the evening light, small and rectangular, dark tile turning the water the color of deep jade.
I paid for it two years ago after my third collection sold out in forty-eight hours.
My mother called to thank me and spent ten minutes telling me it was too much.
Then she sent me a photo of my father floating on his back in it at seven in the morning with his coffee balanced on his chest.
Neither of us mentioned the too much again.
The pool house sits at the far end, glass-fronted and warm-lit from within.
Two bedrooms, a small sitting room, a bathroom with heated floors my mother insisted on because guests deserve comfort, not just shelter.
She built it for family. For the people she expected would come now that there was room to receive them properly.
Seeing Connor beside me in this garden, I understand for the first time exactly who she was building it for.
Connor finds me at the stone bench near the star fruit tree.
He crosses the garden without hurry, no performance in it, and goes down on one knee on the garden path before I've registered what's happening.
The ring catches the dusk light.
Emerald cut. Clean lines. Simple and architectural and completely, unmistakably me.
"I had Nate source it on the way in," he says, and there's something almost boyish in his voice, the faintest thread of uncertainty underneath the composure. "I called him from the plane. I needed you to know this wasn't an impulse."
He holds my gaze from one knee, steady and unguarded and entirely without strategy.
"I love you. I've known for a long time. Will you marry me, Rachel?"
I look at the ring.
At the man holding it.
At the garden her father planted around us both.
"Yes." The word comes out before he finishes the question. "I was already saying yes before you got there."
Something breaks open in his face. Not the controlled relief of a man who has won a negotiation. Something rawer, like a window opening in a room that has been closed too long.
He slides the ring onto my finger and rises, and I pull him into a kiss before he's fully standing, laughing against his mouth, my hands framing his face.
"You had Nate pick up a diamond," I say when we surface.
"I had Nate pick up a diamond."
"While my mother was making ph?."
"Timing is everything."
I laugh again, bright and real and completely unguarded, and he holds me in the garden while the jasmine does what it always does at this hour, generous and inevitable, and the pool house glows warm at the end of the path.
My mother is in the kitchen window.
Very obviously not watching us.
Which means she has been watching us until approximately four seconds ago.
Connor follows my gaze. "How long has she been there?"
"Long enough." I take his hand, lace our fingers through his. "She's happy. When she's happy she pretends not to see things."
He brings my hand up and presses his lips to my knuckles, unhurried, eyes on mine.
"And your father?"
"My father built my mother a trellis for jasmine she wanted. He's been trying to tell me something with that story my entire life." I look at the wall where the jasmine climbs. "I think you might be the first person outside this family he's ever told it to."
Something settles in Connor's expression then. A groundedness I haven't seen in him before, or maybe it's always been there underneath and I'm only now seeing it with the armor gone.
We go back inside.
My father refills Connor's glass and launches into the story of the neighbor's dog and the garden, and Connor listens like it's the most important intelligence briefing of his career.
Maybe it is.
I catch my mother's eye across the table. She lifts her glass slightly, the smallest acknowledgment, and looks away.
Later, much later, Connor and I walk the path to the pool house through garden dark and jasmine-sweet, his hand warm around mine, the ring already feeling like it was always supposed to be there.
He stops at the pool house door. Turns to face me. The water behind us catches the moon and throws soft light across his face, and I see it clearly for the first time. Not the fixer, not the strategist, not the man with all the answers.
Just Connor. Choosing this. Choosing me.
"Whatever's waiting in Milan," he says quietly. "We face it together."
I reach up and touch his face. The words I want to say are too large for the night, so I say the only ones that matter.
"Together," I agree.
He kisses me in the moonlight, soft and certain, and I let myself believe for exactly this moment that the world outside these walls can wait.
It can't, of course.
At 1:47 AM, my phone lights up the pool house dark.
A text from a number I don't recognize. No words. Just a photograph.
Connor and me. Through the pool house window. Right now. The pool glittering behind us. My parents' house warm and lit at the end of the garden.
Then three lines that turn the jasmine air to ice.
How's the pool, sweetheart?
Mommy and daddy can't help you here.
Just when you think it's safe. We're still watching.
I sit up in the dark.
Connor is already awake.