Chapter Thirty-Three
Three Months Later
Sydney
I’m at the counter cutting strawberries when Archer comes downstairs in sweats and no shirt, his hair still wet from the shower. For a moment, I forget what I’m doing.
I’ve lived with this man for months. We’ve shared a bathroom, a bed, and a coffee maker. I’ve watched him brush his teeth approximately four hundred times.
He still does this to me.
“Morning,” he says, walking past me toward the coffee.
“Morning.”
His hand brushes against my lower back as he goes by—casual, automatic, the way he touches me when he’s moving through a room I’m in.
He does it all the time now: a hand on my hip in the kitchen, fingers at the nape of my neck while he reads something on his phone, his palm flat between my shoulder blades when we walk through a door.
Like he can’t quite stop checking that I’m where he left me.
It’s sweet.
“Twins up?” he asks.
“Lily’s been up for an hour. She made me draw a unicorn before I’d had any coffee. It was rough.” I slide the bowl of strawberries across the island. “Luke is reading in his bed and refusing to come out until you confirm that the new fish encyclopedia he wants is, and I quote, ‘on the way.’”
“It’s on the way.”
“He’ll want a delivery date.”
“I think Tuesday.”
“Tell him yourself, Lockwood. I’m not getting cross-examined by a four-year-old before nine AM.”
He grins into his coffee. This year, he’s been doing more of that—grinning, easy, like his face has remembered how. I caught Bree noticing it at the last drop-off. She didn’t say anything; she just looked at him, then at me, and I think she was glad. I think we’re both finally glad.
He sets his mug down and leans against the counter across from me, arms crossed, just watching.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m allowed to stare. I live with you.”
“That’s a stretch of the rules.”
“I’ll take it up with management.” He takes a sip of his coffee, still watching me. “Syd.”
“Yeah?”
“Marry me.”
I stop cutting.
The knife is halfway through a strawberry, and my hand freezes. I look up at him. He’s leaning against the counter in sweats and no shirt, holding a coffee mug with a chip on the rim that I’ve been meaning to throw out for six months, and he’s looking at me like he asked what I want for dinner.
“What?”
“Marry me.”
“Archer.”
“Sydney.”
I set the knife down. My hands are pink from the strawberries. “You’re proposing in the kitchen?”
“Yeah.” His mouth softens slightly.
“With no ring.”
“The ring’s upstairs. I’ve been carrying it around for a month. I keep almost doing it and then chickening out. This morning, I came down, and you were cutting strawberries and wearing my t-shirt, and I thought, uh, yeah. Now.”
“Now?” My eyebrows lift.
“Now.”
I press my hand flat against the counter to steady myself because my legs have gone a little weak. His eyes drop to my hand and then back to my face, and he straightens up off the counter and crosses to me. His hands find my waist, and the marble is cold against my back.
“I’m sorry it’s not more romantic,” he says quietly. “I know you probably pictured something else. A view. A speech. Some, uh—grand gesture. I had a whole thing planned for next week, I really did, but I can’t wait one more day, Syd. I’m sorry.”
“Arch—”
“I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you for fifteen years, and I wasted most of them, and I’m not wasting any more.” His hand comes up to my jaw, his thumb brushing along my cheekbone. “Be my wife, honey.”
My eyes are stinging. I press my palm against his bare chest, feeling his heart racing—fast, faster than his face shows.
He’s nervous. Archer Lockwood, starting goalie, who once stopped a one-timer with his shoulder in overtime and then joked about it on camera, is standing in our kitchen at 8 AM with a heart rate that says otherwise.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yes, Arch. Obviously yes.”
He exhales. His whole body loosens with it. Then he picks me up—lifts me clean off the floor, one arm under my thighs, the other around my back—and I laugh into his neck, my arms around him.
“I love you,” he says into my hair.
“I love you. Now put me down.” I laugh.
A small voice comes from the doorway. “Why is Daddy holding Auntie Syd?”
It’s Lily, in her unicorn pajamas, holding Jeffrey by one leg, surveying the kitchen.
Archer puts me down. “Lil. Got some news.”
“Did you win something?”
“Sort of.” He gazes at me. “Auntie Syd just said she’d marry me.”
Lily processes this. Jeffrey dangles, forgotten.
She takes one careful step into the kitchen. “So is Auntie Syd going to be our mom too?”
Oh.
The bowl of strawberries on the counter goes a little blurry. I press my face into Archer’s neck because if I look at her right now, I’m going to fall apart.
Archer’s hand tightens on my back. He clears his throat once, then again, because he’s got the same problem I have.
“You already have a mommy, bug. Mommy’s still your mommy.”
“I know that.” She says it like he’s the slow one in this conversation. “But Auntie Syd lives here. And she does my braids. And she packs the snacks. So can she be a mom too? Like, also.”
I lift my head. She’s watching me, completely calm, like she’s asking what’s for lunch.
“Yeah, baby.” My voice comes out wrecked. “If you want me to be.”
“Okay.” She nods once. “But I’m still calling you Syd. Mom is too many letters when I’m in a hurry.”
I laugh. It apparently only makes sense in four-year-old logic. “Whatever you want.”
“Cool.” She holds Jeffrey up for me to kiss, and I kiss him on his felt nose.
“Will there be like a wedding wedding?”
“Yes,” Archer and I say at the same time, grinning at each other.
“Will I get a dress?”
“You’ll get a dress,” I say.
“Will Luke have to wear a tie?”
“Uh, I guess so,” Archer says.
“Luke is gonna hate that.”
“Probably.” Arch chuckles.
She thinks about it for another beat, then drops Jeffrey on the kitchen floor and runs out of the room screaming, “LUKE. LUKE. YOU HAVE TO WEAR A TIE. AUNTIE SYD AND DADDY ARE GETTING MARRIED!”
Archer presses his forehead against mine. “That went well.”
“She buried the lede.”
“She did.”
“She’s so your daughter.”
“Yeah.” He kisses me—slow, warm, his hand at the back of my neck. “She’s also yours, Syd. You know that, right?”
I turn my face into his shoulder so he can’t see me cry.
Luke arrives in the doorway in his pajamas, holding a book against his chest. “Lily says you and Daddy are getting married.”
“We are.”
“Lily says I have to wear a tie.”
“We can figure that out later, buddy.”
He thinks about this. Looks at the ceiling, then at the floor, then at me. “Will you still read the octopus book at bedtime?”
“Every night.”
“Even after the wedding?”
“Especially after the wedding,” I tell him.
“Okay.” He nods, satisfied.
He walks back out before I can answer.
Archer kisses my head and then picks Jeffrey up off the floor and sets him on the counter like he’s a guest at this whole thing.
“I’m going to get the ring,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Don’t move.” He kisses me one more time and goes upstairs. I hear his footsteps and Lily’s voice still going at full volume down the hallway, and Luke saying something measured back to her. I press both hands flat on the counter and breathe.
His footsteps come back down the stairs slower than they went up. I can hear him in the hallway, hear Lily ambushing him with what sounds like a question about flower girls, hear his low, yeah, bug, we’ll figure it out.
Then he’s in the doorway.
He’s got both hands behind his back like he’s nine years old and hiding something from his mother, and the look on his face—sheepish, a little stunned, his mouth doing the thing it does when he’s trying not to smile and losing—makes my eyes fill up before he’s even crossed the room.
“Don’t cry yet.”
“Too late.”
“Syd.” He laughs, low, and walks over to me. One hand comes out from behind his back. Then the other. He’s holding a small navy box, soft velvet.
He opens it.
Oh.
It’s not flashy. It’s not the kind of ring a hockey player buys to prove a point.
The band is gold, thin, and the stone is an oval—with two tiny diamonds tucked on either side like they’re keeping it company.
It looks like something my grandmother might have worn.
It looks like something Sydney Lane would pick out for herself if she’d let herself want a ring.
He knows this. Because he knows me.
“Arch.”
“Yeah?”
“This is—”
“My mom helped.” He clears his throat. “I went up to see her in May, took her to lunch, told her I was thinking about it. She, uh—she had a few of my grandmother’s pieces.
These small side stones were hers.” He’s not looking at me.
He’s looking at the ring. “I had it reset. I hope you like it, honey. But if not—”
I place a hand over my mouth, speechless.
He laughs again, wetter this time, and lifts the ring out of the box. The kitchen light hits the stone and makes it warm, not sharp—rose gold does that. It pulls the gold instead of the white. It looks like late afternoon on my hand before it’s even on my hand.
He takes my left hand. My fingers are still pink from the strawberries and probably a little sticky, and I try to apologize for it, but he shakes his head once like don’t. Then he just stops. Holds my hand in both of his. Looks at it for a second like he’s memorizing what it looks like before.
“I love you, Sydney.”
“I love you, Arch.”
“I’m going to do this part right, okay?”
“Okay.”
He slides the ring onto my finger. Slow. The band is cool against my skin and a little loose around the knuckle, the way rings always are when they’re new, and it settles at the base of my finger like it’s been waiting for this the whole time.
He brings my hand up and kisses my knuckles, right above the stone.
I wipe my cheek.
“You good?” he murmurs into my hair.
“I’m so good. And I love the ring.”
“Yeah?”
I laugh into his neck, soggy and ridiculous, and lift my head.
My ring catches the light over his shoulder, and I look at it because I have to, because I’ve been looking at women’s left hands for fifteen years wondering what mine would look like one day, and here it is.
On me. From him. With his grandmother’s stones flanking it.
“Arch.”
“Yeah?”
I cup his face with both hands, pull him down, and kiss him.
He tastes like coffee, and the ring is on my finger, and somewhere in the next room, Lily is loudly informing Luke that Daddy gave Auntie Syd a sparkly.
I am going to remember for the rest of my life that the moment Archer Lockwood put a ring on me, his four-year-old daughter narrated it from the next room.