Prologue #3
“Because I wanted you to ask.” I reach up and touch his face - the tears, the stubble he forgot to shave, the small tremor in his jaw that no boardroom has ever seen. “I wanted you to be sure.”
“I’ve been sure since the day I met you.”
“You’ve been sure since the day you met me, and it took you a year of third Fridays to propose?”
“I’m a slow learner.” He turns his head and kisses my palm. “But I get there eventually.”
His hands shake when he reaches for the ring again. Mine shake when I hold out my hand. The stone catches what little light exists as he slides it onto my finger, and for a moment we both just stare at it.
“It fits,” I whisper.
“I measured your hand while you were sleeping.”
“That’s creepy.”
“That’s thorough.”
“That’s creepy, thorough, and I love it.” I hold my hand up between us. “You measured my hand in my sleep like some kind of romantic stalker.”
“Romantic stalker is going on my business cards.”
“It should. It’s accurate.”
“It was my grandmother’s,” he says, quieter now, watching the ring instead of me.
“The real one. Not the Dean side. She left it to me when I was twelve, and she said I should give it to someone who made me want to be better than I was.” His thumb moves over the stone, over my finger under it.
“I was twelve years old, holding a ring in a box, thinking, someday I’m going to meet someone who makes this make sense.
And then you looked up from the research desk and asked me why my book was upside down, and-”
I kiss him before he can finish.
It’s messy and loud and neither of us can breathe properly, and I’m laughing into it, too loud for a library, the sound bouncing off the shelves and echoing into the dark.
“Quiet, future Mrs. Dean.” His smile presses against my temple. “Dennis is counting.”
I cry on him anyway.
He cries on me.
And somewhere in the middle of it, his phone starts buzzing against the shelf where he set it down, screen flaring bright enough to make me wince.
ELEANOR.
We both freeze.
His hand twitches toward it. Automatic. Trained. A reflex built over decades of answering when his mother calls.
My chest tightens.
He looks at the screen. Looks at me. Looks back at the screen.
Then he picks up the phone, and my heart drops-
And he turns it off.
Not silences it. Not flips it face down. Turns it completely off, holding the button until the screen goes black.
“She can find out tomorrow,” he says. “Tonight is ours.”
I stare at him. “She’s going to be furious.”
“She’s going to be thrilled. She gets to plan an engagement party.
It’s her favorite thing.” He sets the dead phone on the shelf, screen down, like closing a door, and pulls me back into his arms. “She can have the champagne toast and the society pages and the guest list she’s already drafting in her sleep.
But this part - you and me and the dust and the dark - she doesn’t get to touch.
No one gets to touch this. This is just for us. ”
“Just for us,” I repeat.
“Just for us.” He presses his forehead to mine. “My fiancée.”
Fiancée.
The word lands somewhere in my chest and starts glowing.
“Say that again.”
“My fiancée. My future wife.” His grin hurts to look at. “The woman who said obviously yes in a library at midnight while Dennis bills us by the minute in Bermuda money.”
“He’s going to tell everyone.”
“He’s absolutely going to tell everyone. We’re going to be a local legend. The lunatics who got engaged in the stacks.”
“There are worse legacies.”
“There are no better ones.” He tucks a ruined strand of hair behind my ear, and his hand stays there, cradling my jaw like the answer might still change. “I love you, Juliette.”
“I love you too. Now shut up before you make me cry again.”
“Too late.”
“Shut up anyway.”
He does.
And in the dark of the library, surrounded by a century of words other people wrote about love, we start writing our own.
Later, when Dennis has made increasingly pointed comments about his Bermuda plans and we’ve finally agreed to leave, I make Zachary wait.
“What are you doing?”
I’m pulling a pen from my purse, a scrap of paper from the returns desk.
“Writing you a note.”
“Right now?”
“It has to live here.” My hand moves fast across the paper. “In the book you pretended to need the first time. It has to be on that shelf forever.”
He watches me tuck the folded paper into the spine of a novel neither of us has read. His fingers brush the spine after, gentle, the way they steadied the ring box.
“What does it say?”
“You’ll find out when you come back.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s the game.” I take his hand, press it flat against the shelf, ring caught between our palms. “Every note is a reason to come back. That’s how this works.”
“I’ll come back,” he says. “Every time. For the rest of my life.”
I believe him.
Standing in the dark with his hand in mine, I believe every word. I believe in the notes and the third Fridays and the way he silenced his mother’s call without hesitation. I believe this man will spend the rest of his life coming back to me.
I’m going to love him forever.
And the best part is how easy it’s going to be.