30. The Question
Chapter thirty
The Question
Ethan
Six months is apparently how long it takes to go from "professionally destroyed disaster" to "cautiously optimistic almost-normal person," at least according to my extremely unscientific personal timeline.
The ethics board, in the end, split the difference between mercy and punishment: eighteen-month suspension instead of permanent disbarment, contingent on completing an ethics course that I privately suspected had been designed by someone who'd read my case file and decided to make an example out of me in workshop form.
Judge Morrison's letter had apparently mattered.
So had Jennifer Walsh's testimony about my cooperation with the criminal case, and—somewhat to my surprise—so had two hundred witness statements from Lopez Island residents who'd shown up exactly like they'd promised, submitting written accounts of what the fraud exposure had actually protected.
Marcus's civil suit collapsed three months in, once the criminal case against Hutchins and the investment group resulted in guilty pleas across the board—turns out juries and defendants alike find it hard to argue "he stole documents maliciously" when the documents in question prove an actual, admitted criminal conspiracy.
Marcus settled for a face-saving nuisance amount that Richard negotiated down to nearly nothing, and Victoria Curtis's additional complaint quietly evaporated once her brother's credibility imploded alongside his firm's.
Caldwell & Associates dissolved entirely eight weeks ago, the partners scattering to smaller firms with noticeably diminished client lists. I felt approximately zero sympathy about this.
Patterson & Associates opened their Lopez Island satellite office in April, which meant I now spent three days a week doing paralegal and investigative work from a converted boathouse near the marina, and would transition to full associate status the moment my suspension lifted in eleven months.
It wasn't the corner office I used to have. It was better.
And Maya—Maya had spent six months running the busiest bakery in the San Juan Islands, expanding to supply two more hotels, hiring a second full-time baker so she could occasionally leave before 6 PM, and generally becoming the kind of local legend that made tourists specifically plan trips around pastéis de nata availability.
We'd built exactly the life we'd promised each other that midnight in her kitchen. Messy, complicated, occasionally involving unexpected process servers, but real.
Which was why I was currently standing on the north-island overlook with a ring box burning a hole through my jacket pocket like it had opinions about my nerve.
"You're doing the thing," Maya said, hiking up the trail behind me, slightly out of breath from the climb. "The thing where you go quiet and stare at the water like it personally wronged you."
"I don't have a thing."
"You absolutely have a thing. You've had a thing for months. Tessa noticed it too, so when her next book comes out, be prepared to read about Edgar the lawyer doing the exact same thing.”
"Maybe I'm just admiring the view."
"You've admired this exact view roughly four hundred times since we started dating.
I know what regular Ethan-admiring-a-view looks like, and this isn't it.
This is nervous Ethan. Suspiciously well-dressed Ethan, might I add, for what you described as 'just a hike.
'" She gestured at my definitely-too-nice shirt for hiking terrain. "What's going on?"
I turned to face her, and every carefully rehearsed speech I'd been practicing for a week evaporated instantly, the way they apparently always do in moments like this, leaving nothing but the actual truth standing there unrehearsed.
"Twenty years ago, I stood somewhere near here—not this exact spot, but close—the night before I left for college.
Reflecting on how I was so angry at everything, so certain I'd never figure out how to be someone worth respecting.
I spent fifteen years destroying things efficiently and calling it success.
Then I came back to this island, met you—properly met you, adult you, brilliant and stubborn and completely unimpressed by my corporate credentials—and everything your grandfather taught me finally made sense.
Building isn't just better than destroying.
It's the only thing that actually means anything. "
"Ethan—" Her voice had gone soft, uncertain in the specific way that told me she'd started to suspect where this was headed.
"I've spent six months building a life with you.
A real one—messy, occasionally sued, definitely more complicated than either of us planned.
And I don't want to just keep building it as some undefined, ongoing arrangement.
I want to build it as something permanent.
Something with your grandfather's name on it, honestly, because Romano built this island's trust one loaf of bread at a time, and I'd be honored beyond words to spend my life trying to live up to that. "
I got down on one knee, which on a rocky overlook trail was significantly less graceful than movies made it look, and pulled out the ring—simple, vintage, found at an estate sale in Anacortes because I'd wanted something with history instead of something engineered to look expensive.
"Maya Romano, I destroyed your family's bakery once, twenty years ago, in the worst moment of my life. Your grandfather gave me a chance to build it back. You gave me a chance to become someone worth loving. I would like to spend the rest of my life proving both of you right. Will you marry me?"
For a long moment, Maya just stared at me, her hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes bright with tears that hadn't quite decided whether to fall yet.
"You planned a proposal around a criminal confession," she finally said, half-laughing, half-crying. "Only you would find a way to make 'I once vandalized your family's business' into the most romantic speech I've ever heard."
"Is that a yes? Because my knee is doing something concerning on this gravel, and I'd love clarification before it becomes a medical issue."
"Yes. Obviously yes. Completely, ridiculously yes." She pulled me up, kissing me before I'd even fully processed the greatest word I'd heard in my entire life. "You absolute disaster. You beautiful, chaotic, occasionally disbarred disaster. Yes."
I slid the ring onto her finger, my hands shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the climb up here, and kissed her again, the overlook and the ocean and twenty years of history all folding into this one perfect, ordinary-extraordinary moment.
"For the record," Maya said against my mouth, "I would have said yes even without the beautiful speech about building versus destroying. I'd have said yes if you'd just handed me a ring wrapped in a to-go bag from the bakery."
"Noted for our anniversary gifts."
"I'm serious. I fell in love with you exactly as you are, Ethan Caldwell—including the parts where you're a walking legal disaster who apparently cannot stop confessing crimes at romantic moments."
"It's a very specific skill set."
"It's extremely specific, yes." She laughed, wiping her eyes, looking down at the ring like she still couldn't quite believe it was real. "My mother is going to be insufferable about this. She's already planning a wedding in her head, I guarantee it, and we haven't even told anyone yet."
"Tessa's going to be worse. She'll probably want to write the proposal into her book."
"She absolutely will, and you'll pretend to be annoyed about it, and secretly you'll love that some version of this moment gets to live forever in print.
" Maya pulled me close again, resting her forehead against mine, the exact gesture we'd shared on this same island a hundred times over the last six months.
"I love you. Completely, chaotically, ironclad-legal-document-level love you. "
"I love you too. Building instead of destroying, for the rest of our lives."
"Together," she added, the word we'd claimed as ours somewhere back in the wreckage of courtroom battles and lawsuit chaos.
"Together," I agreed.
We stood on that overlook for a long time after, watching the afternoon light shift over the water, neither of us in any hurry to leave.
Somewhere down the hill, Honey & Hearth was waiting—full of Manuel's legacy, five generations of tradition, and now, apparently, one very committed lawyer who'd spent twenty years learning exactly what it meant to build something worth keeping.
I'd come back to this island once as someone sent to destroy what mattered most to Maya. I was leaving this overlook as someone who'd finally, fully earned the right to help protect it.
Manuel would have approved. I was almost certain of that.
Almost, and completely certain, all at once—which felt like exactly the right way to feel about everything that had happened since I walked back through that bakery door six months ago.