Chapter 40
Julie looked around the kitchen. The dishes were done and the leftovers were in the refrigerator.
That was the thing about Christmas dinner. It took all day to prepare and less than forty minutes to eat. And then you were left standing at the sink in a kitchen that smelled of roast vegetables and cinnamon, trying to figure out where the day had gone.
Julie dried her hands on the dish towel and stood in the doorway to the living room.
Nellie was asleep on the rug, her cheek pressed against the folded blanket Maddie had slid beneath her head. She’d fought sleep to the last, and then surrendered between one breath and the next, her small fist curled loosely near her chin.
Daniel, Maddie, and Meg were on the sofa.
The television was on.
“I don’t understand why we’re watching this,” Daniel said. His arms were folded and his jaw was set at a stubborn angle. “It’s Christmas. There are rules about Christmas viewing, and this does not qualify.”
“You’ve seen every spy movie ever made,” Meg told him. “Multiple times.”
“That’s because they’re good.”
“This is also good.”
Daniel gestured at the screen, where the lead actors were standing in the rain in what appeared to be an emotionally significant moment. “They’ve been standing in the rain for four minutes. No one has been chased, captured, or surprised by anything.”
“It’s called emotion, Daniel.”
“It’s called a weather problem,” he grumbled.
Maddie patted his arm without looking away from the screen. It was the comfortable, practiced movement of a woman who’d long since stopped expecting this argument to end differently.
Cole appeared at Julie’s shoulder. She hadn’t heard him come down the hall from where he’d been putting away the last of the serving dishes.
He watched Daniel, then whispered in Julie’s ear, “How long has this been going on?”
“Since the opening credits,” Julie said.
Cole made a quiet sound that might have been sympathy for Daniel or amusement at him. Possibly both.
He lifted his jacket from the hook near the door, and draped it over Julie’s shoulders. “Come outside,” he said. “The sky is doing something worth seeing.”
Julie made sure Nellie was okay. She was still asleep, her chest rising and falling, one sock half-off her foot. She looked at Meg, Daniel, and Maddie, the warm clutter of them filling her living room.
Daniel started to stand. “I’ll come with you.”
Meg reached over without looking and took hold of his sleeve. She’d been keeping an eye on Cole and Julie all evening. She pulled Daniel back down.
He looked at her, and something passed between them. Daniel sat, glanced at the screen, and sighed.
“The rain has stopped,” he told his sister.
“There you go,” Meg replied.
Julie stepped outside.
The cold was immediate and clean, the kind that emptied your lungs on the first breath and made everything sharper.
She looked up at the sky and picked out the Pleiades low over the ridge, and the wide sweep of the Milky Way running north to south like something spilled and left there.
Cole stood beside her. He didn’t say anything at first.
That was something she’d grown to trust about him. He didn’t fill silences because they made him uneasy. He let them be what they were.
After a while, she tilted her head a little further back.
“You can’t get a sky like this anywhere else,” she said.
“No,” Cole agreed. “You can’t.”
The lights from the cottage fell in a soft rectangle across the frozen grass. Inside, the Christmas tree blinked steadily through the front window. She could just make out the silhouette of the star at the top.
When she first arrived in Sapphire Bay, Julie thought the sky was the loneliest thing about it.
All that space and nothing to anchor you.
She’d stood outside her cottage more than once in those early weeks, looking up and feeling the distance between herself and everything she thought she was supposed to be.
It didn’t feel that way now.
Cole reached into the front pocket of his jacket—the one that was still around her shoulders—and took out something small. He turned it over in his hand once, then held it where she could see it.
It was a ring. Small and plain, the kind that didn’t announce itself. She looked at it, and then she looked at Cole.
“I’ve been thinking about this ring for a few weeks,” he told her. “Trying to work out when it was the right time.” He paused. “I don’t think there’s ever a right time. I think you just get to a point where waiting feels like the wrong choice.”
Julie’s hands were still at her sides. She didn’t move them.
“It belonged to my grandmother,” Cole said. “She loved her family and worked hard. She wore this ring for fifty-two years and it was part of her.” He looked at it, then into Julie’s eyes. “I’ve never wanted to give it to anyone before. I want to give it to you.”
Julie looked down at the ring. Cole’s hands were trembling, and she loved him all the more for it.
“Julie.” He said her name as if it were the whole sentence.
“I wasn’t looking for this. I want you to know that.
I wasn’t looking for anything when I came to Sapphire Bay, except a place to call home.
And then I met you, and you took the floor out from under me, and I haven’t been entirely level since. ”
She kissed Cole’s cheek. “I wasn’t feeling very level either,” she said quietly. “Just so you know.”
Cole’s hand brushed the side of her face.
“I know there’s less road ahead of us than there might have been, and I know you’ve built something here that matters to you.
I’m not asking you to give any of that up.
” He looked at her steadily. “I love you, Julie, and I’m asking if there’s room in your life for me. Will you marry me?”
Julie looked into Cole’s eyes. They were as bright as the stars above them.
She was aware of the warmth of his jacket across her shoulders, of the stillness of the land, of the faint sound of laughter from inside the cottage.
She had been on her own for a long time. Not unhappily. That was the important part. She’d learned how to live her own life without leaning against someone else for support. She was not afraid of being alone. She understood it.
But this was different. Cole saw the person she was today, and wanted to be part of her life. She reached out and took the ring from his palm.
She held it for a moment, feeling its smallness. A woman she’d never met had worn this through fifty-two years of ordinary days, and there was more life in it than any statement piece could have carried.
“Yes,” she said.
Cole was quiet for a second.
“Just yes?” he asked.
Julie looked up at him. “I love you, Cole, and I want to be part of your life. For all of it. The hard days and the routine ones.” She looked at him steadily. “I want to be the person you come home to. For as long as we have together.”
Cole hugged her close, then took the ring gently and placed it on her finger. It fit as though some measurement had been taken that neither of them remembered giving.
Tears filled Julie’s eyes as she imagined having Cole beside her, each and every day.
Cole lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her fingers. “I love you, Julie. I knew it long before I was ready to say it. And I promise to love you for the rest of my life.”
Behind them, the front door swung open.
“I told you Mom would say yes,” Daniel said in a superior voice.
“Don’t be such a know-it-all,” Meg told him in a hushed whisper.
Julie turned. Her two children and her daughter-in-law were standing in the doorway. Daniel had his arms folded across his chest and a grin he wasn’t bothering to hide. Both of Maddie’s hands were pressed against her mouth, and Meg had tears running down her face.
“How long have you been standing there?” Julie asked.
“Long enough,” Meg said, and crossed the porch to wrap her arms around her mom.
Julie held her daughter tight, with one hand wearing Cole’s grandmother’s ring, and her face pressed into Meg’s hair.
Over Meg’s shoulder, Julie saw Daniel shaking Cole’s hand with the kind of grip that meant more than a handshake. Maddie had stepped forward and was saying something to Cole that made him duck his head and smile.
When Meg finally pulled back, her eyes were full of tears. She looked at Julie’s hand, and then at her face. “You’re happy, Mom,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Julie sighed. “I am.”
Daniel pulled her into a hug. “Congratulations, Mom,” he said softly. Then, louder, to no one in particular: “Can we watch something decent on TV now?”
Maddie laughed, Meg made a noise of protest, and Cole’s shoulders shook with laughter.
Julie stood in the middle of her family, and let herself feel the full weight of how far she'd come. And it all began with a man wanting to find home, and a woman who’d lost hers.
Wrapping her arm around Cole’s waist, she leaned into his chest.
She wasn’t lost anymore.
THE END