20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Demetrius
The front door opens on the first knock.
Not the old front door, I should say. The old front door had a warped floorboard underneath it that made it stick in the frame. The new door hangs square and straight and opens cleanly.
Lenny Berwick stands in the doorway with a broad smile that twitches against his tusks.
"Demetrius." He looks up at me with a grin and steps aside. "Come in, come in. Grace is putting the finishing touches on her signature lemon cake."
"That alone is worth the drive across town."
"Beer?"
"Please."
He claps me on the shoulder as I pass. The house is warm and loud and smells of lemon cake and vanilla. I follow Lenny toward the kitchen and the noise rises with every step, because the kitchen is where the noise lives.
Grace Berwick is at the stove, and stationed at the kitchen table in the good chair closest to the window, presiding over the room like a visiting dignitary who has specific opinions about the seasoning, is my grandmother.
Some things don't need to change.
"The tuna salad needs more salt," Agatha says, cranking her neck to look at whatever Grace is preparing.
"There is plenty of salt," Grace says, without turning around.
A pause settles between them, brief and satisfied, the way silences settle between people who have decided they enjoy arguing with each other.
Agatha's cane is propped against the table leg. She's been railing against it for eight months, but she's still using it despite her misgivings. She glances at me from the corner of her eye and nods once.
"You're late," she says.
"I'm three minutes early."
"Semantics."
Lenny hands me a beer and I take it, leaning into the doorframe.
"What's in the yard?" I ask Lenny.
He tips his head toward the sliding door and I follow him around the island to look out, and the answer to my question is Jazz, standing at the grill with a pair of tongs and an expression of absolute authority.
Lenny's senior site foreman, a centaur named Frank whom I have met twice, stands beside her with a look of cautious admiration.
"She showed up with a rub she made from scratch," Lenny tells me, his voice carrying the tone of a man who is not sure how this happened but has decided to be grateful. "Told Frank he'd been doing ribs wrong his whole life."
"Had he been?"
"According to Jazz." A pause. "Also, yes. Frank's ribs are terrible."
Jazz turns from the grill and catches sight of me through the glass. She points the tongs at me in what I have come to understand is her version of a greeting, then goes back to the ribs without a word. Frank watches her with a frown, then snaps pictures of whatever she's been doing.
I take a pull of my beer and consider the fact that Jazz and I are now so familiar with one another.
She doesn't waste a single chance to make fun of me.
Ruthlessly. But in the end, she decided to accept me as part of Maddie's life and we're now locked in a sort of truce.
The universe, as it turns out, has a very specific sense of humor.
Then the hallway door opens and Maddie comes through it.
She has flour on her chin, which tells me she has been helping with the cake, and her hair is up in a messy bun. She wears a green blouse that is the color of the bay in the morning, and she stops when she sees me. She smiles, and my chest expands several sizes all at once.
In the eight months since that day I made a fool of myself in front of her entire family it has not faded by so much as a fraction.
"You have flour on your face," I say.
She touches her chin, then looks at her fingers. "How much?"
"Enough."
"Fantastic." She crosses to me and goes up on her toes and I come down to meet her and her mouth is warm and she tastes faintly of lemon frosting. "How long have you been here?"
"Long enough to witness Agatha and Grace arguing about the tuna salad."
She turns to look at the stove, where Grace is now ignoring Agatha with dedicated focus.
"Agatha's going to win eventually." She shakes her head. "She always wins eventually."
"She does," I agree, because this is simply true. No one can out-stubborn Agatha Thornwood, not even an orc.
Maddie takes my beer out of my hand, has a sip, and gives it back.
"Come outside," she says. "Jazz is cooking ribs."
The backyard is warm and unhurried in the early evening light.
Frank departs with a nod and a container of Jazz's rub that he has apparently negotiated for himself, and then it's just the four of us out here.
Lenny sits in the good lawn chair and tilts his face up to the sky as the copper color of the setting sun falls over him.
Dinner is loud.
The table is not large enough for all of us, which means we eat all cramped up and elbowing each other good-naturedly. When dinner is over and everyone looks ready to snore themselves into a food coma, I know this is the moment.
It's now or never. Not a different moment. This one.
I push back my chair.
The noise at the table dips by a fraction and I go around to Maddie's side, and when she looks up at me with a small crease between her brows, I go down on one knee.
The kitchen goes so quiet I can hear the wind coming from the bay outside.
She stares at me. Her fork is still in her hand and she brings it back down slowly and deliberately.
I reach for my jacket pocket and retrieve the small velvet box that has been burning a hole in my pocket for the past month.
"Maddie," I say through a closed throat.
"Demetrius, what are you doing?"
She makes a sound that is three-quarters laugh and somewhere in the quarter left over is the beginning of tears.
"You've made me the happiest man on Earth. You're all I have ever wanted and I am ashamed that it took me fifteen years to find the courage to own up to my mistake. And I would like to put you first for the rest of my life, if you'll have me."
Maddie is already nodding before I finish the question. She is nodding so fast her hair is coming loose from the twist and tears are streaming down her face.
"Yes!" Maddie finally shouts between sobs. "Yes, a thousand times yes!"
She's still laughing and crying as I get the ring on her finger.
It is Agatha's emerald, the quail-egg stone I have known on my grandmother's hand my whole life, the same ring I offered Maddie on the pier fifteen years ago and carried home in its box when she gave it back.
It has waited all that time for the only hand it was ever meant for, and now it is where it belongs.
And then her hands are on my face pulling me up. My lips collapse against hers.
From behind me, Lenny starts clapping. Others follow, coupled with Jazz's whistling.
Of course she does.
"About time," Jazz says above the sound of the applause.
"Indeed," my grandmother adds, smugly watching from her chair.
When I finally let Maddie go, she turns to her mother, who envelops her in an embrace where she almost disappears in the large orc woman's arms. Grace is crying as well and then Lenny joins the group, followed by Jazz.
Even Agatha gets up from her chair and walks, aided by her cane, to join the group hug.
Something I would have never, ever dreamed of seeing.
When Agatha turns to me with a raised brow, I join in also. My arms close around that group of people who are more precious to me than all the possessions to my name.
I have it all. I honestly have it all.
My entire chest swells with the kind of happiness that can't be bought, not even in a skyscraper in Dubai.