Epilogue
Richard
Five years.
That’s the math I keep doing tonight, standing in a hotel room in Paris with a glass of champagne I’m not drinking, watching Emily at the window.
Five years since a high school reunion I almost didn’t go to.
Five years since I watched her wind up and throw her wedding ring into a lake without one second of hesitation, and thought, there she is, there’s the girl I’ve been carrying around in my chest for a decade.
She’s got the curtains pulled back and the Eiffel Tower lit up gold against the dark, and she’s just looking at it, barefoot, in one of my shirts she stole the second we got here.
“This is ridiculous,” she says, not turning around.
“What is?”
“All of it. The view. This room. The champagne that probably costs more than my first car.” She finally looks back at me, and there’s that grin, the one that still does the same thing to me it did when I was seventeen.
“You flew me to Paris on a private plane for an anniversary. You know normal people get a dinner reservation.”
“Normal people aren’t married to their work like I used to be.” I set the glass down. “And it’s a special one.”
“Five years isn’t a special number. Ten’s a number. Twenty-five. Five is a participation trophy.”
“It’s special to me.”
She rolls her eyes, but it goes soft at the edges, and she crosses the room and climbs into my lap without being asked, like she’s got every right to the space, which she does now. She didn’t used to. I think about that more than I let on.
We don’t make it out for dinner. We order room service at midnight and eat it half-dressed on the floor by the window.
Later she’s lying against my chest with her hair everywhere, the lights of the city coming through the glass, and I lie there with her warm against me and try not to be obvious about how much I’m looking at her.
Because here’s the thing I still can’t get over, five years in.
The woman who came back from that reunion with her whole life zipped into one suitcase couldn’t trust a single person who’d ever claimed to love her, and for good reason.
She’d spent two years being made small in a house that punished her for taking up any room at all.
And now she runs her own firm, walks into boardrooms full of men who’d have eaten the old her alive, and reorganizes their whole operations while they thank her and pay her more an hour than Henry ever let her see in a month.
Every single thing he tried to grind out of her turned out to be the thing that made her brilliant.
I didn’t fix that. I want to be clear about that, even just in my own head. She did it. I just got the staggering luck of being in the room while she did.
“What are you thinking about?” she says into my chest.
“You.”
“Always a safe answer.”
“You used to apologize for taking up space.” I run my hand up her back, slow. “Now you walk into a room and the room rearranges itself around you. You did that. I just watched it happen.”
She’s quiet a second. Then she props herself up on an elbow, looks at me, and there’s something working behind her eyes, a nervousness she almost never carries anymore.
“I want to ask you something,” she says.
“Okay.” I keep my voice easy, but my pulse picks up, because I know that look. I’ve been studying that face for a long time. “Ask.”
“I used to think I’d never want to get married again.” She says it slow, working it out as she goes. “After Henry, that word just meant... trapped. Owned. I couldn’t even think about it. I figured you and me would just go on how we are and I’d never have to call it anything.”
“I know. I never needed you to call it anything.”
“I know you didn’t. That’s sort of the point.” She takes a breath. “I saw the ring.”
Everything in me goes still. “You saw...”
“Three years ago. The box in your sock drawer.” She huffs a small laugh at my face.
“I wasn’t snooping, I swear, I was after a phone charger.
And there it was. God. Gorgeous, way too expensive, completely you.
” Her voice wobbles. “And I shut the drawer and I just stood there shaking. Because all I could think was, he’s going to ask me, I’m going to have to say no, and it’ll wreck us both.
I wasn’t ready. I was so scared of the day you’d finally do it. ”
“Em...”
“But you never did.” She presses on, eyes wet now. “Three years, Richard. You had a ring in a drawer for three years and you never once asked. Because you knew I wasn’t there yet. So you just... didn’t. You waited.”
“I’d have waited as long as it took.” It comes out rough. “Forever, if that’s what it was. I told you that a long time ago and I meant it.”
“I know you would have. That’s why I get to do this now.
” She reaches under her pillow, and when her hand comes back there’s a small worn box in it, nothing like the one in my drawer, and my heart climbs straight up into my throat.
“I found it yesterday. That little antique place in Montmartre, while you were in the shower. It’s old and it’s plain, cost about a hundredth of what yours did.
” She’s gripping the box with both hands to keep it still.
“I wanted it to be me this time. I wanted to be the one who asks. Not get asked, not have it handed to me. Choose it myself.”
She opens the box. A simple gold band, soft with age.
“Richard Reed.” Her voice cracks on it and she doesn’t try to hide it. “You were my first love. And it turns out you’re my best one too. You’re the only person who ever made me feel like I didn’t have to be anything other than what I already am.” She looks me dead in the eyes. “So. Marry me.”
“Yes.”
It’s out before she’s finished the word, wrecked, too loud for the room. “Yes. God, yes, Emily, of course, yes.”
She laughs, this broken happy sound, her hands shaking too hard to do it, so I close mine around them while she slides the band onto my finger. It fits. I look at it sitting there and something in my chest cracks wide open.
“I had a whole plan, you know.” I pull her in against me, too tight, and she squeaks. “For years. Somewhere ridiculous. On one knee. The works. I rewrote it about forty times.”
“And you never used it.”
“You’d have run for the hills. I knew that. So I sat on it.”
“I know.” She says it into my neck. “That’s exactly why I could do it myself.”
“You just proposed to me. In Paris.” I have to say it out loud to believe it. “You. Emily Anderson, who swore off the whole institution.”
“Technically it’s past midnight, so it’s not even our anniversary anymore. It’s just a regular day I proposed to you on.” She pulls back and her face is a mess, streaked and grinning. “Happy tears. In case you were going to ask.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“Good.”
We don’t sleep. We stay up the whole night, tangled in the sheets, talking about everything and nothing, where, when, who we’d even tell first. Somewhere around dawn we end up out on the little balcony with a blanket, watching the sky go gray and then pink over all those rooftops, her back against my chest, my chin on the top of her head.
“What you said before,” she says, quiet. “That the room rearranges around me now. It didn’t always. You know that.”
“I know. You learned it the hard way.”
“I learned a lot of it next to you.”
“You learned it yourself, sunshine. I just got a front-row seat.” I tighten my arms around her. “Best seat in the house. Ten years of trying to get it.”
She tips her head back to look up at me. The light’s coming up behind her, there’s a plain gold ring on my hand that she put there, and I think about the long stupid years I spent too scared to say one true word to this woman. How I almost let her walk off forever, twice.
“I’m glad we got here,” she says. “Eventually.”
“Marry me,” she’d said, an hour ago, in the dark.
And I said yes. The same yes I’ve been saying to her since I was a kid watching her shut down some loudmouth in a crowded cafeteria without ever raising her voice, the yes I never had the guts to say out loud for ten years. I finally got to say it.
I got every single thing I ever wanted. Her, and the morning, and the rest of it.
Every fucking thing.
THE END