Epilogue #3
Julian looks around the room. “There is a great deal of this house I haven’t opened in a very long time. I’m told I don’t have to do all of it at once.”
“Who told you that?”
“Bess.”
I smile. “She’s right. There’s no rush.”
He returns the smile. “No rush at all.”
We stay at the table after that. I eat orange cheese curls out of eighteenth-century silver and drink the wine he poured for me.
He tells me about the first casserole, which apparently Dot fed to her chickens after saying well in a way that will haunt him for decades.
I tell him Lucy is going to make the cheese curls a permanent requirement now.
The candles burn lower, and outside the windows the last of the light leaves the water.
Eventually Julian stands and comes around the table. He holds out his hand, and I take it.
We go to the window at the front of the room. Black Harbor is below us, lights scattered along Water Street and around the harbor. I can see the Widow’s Lantern and the Historical Society and the dark line of the breakwater. Behind us, the dining room clock ticks.
“Penny.”
“Mm?”
“Stay with me.”
I lean against him. “I was going to. I don’t have anything tomorrow until noon and I left half my clothes in the north bedroom anyway.”
“No.”
I lift my head, and he’s looking down at me. Not guarded. Just Julian.
“Stay here,” he says again. “With me.”
Oh.
“I’ve had this house for two hundred and thirty years.
It is the only home I have ever managed to keep.
For most of that time, keeping it was enough.
I knew where everything was. I knew what every room contained.
I knew that I could leave and come back and it would still be here.
” He glances towards the table. “Then you started leaving things here.”
“You mean the hairbrush.”
“The hairbrush. The apron. The shoes beside the back door that I have nearly fallen over twice.”
“You don’t fall over things.”
“I can be inconvenienced.”
I roll my eyes. “How terrible.”
“Two drawers.”
“One of which you didn’t tell me about.”
“Three books in my library that are not mine.”
“They’re cookbooks.”
“They’re still books.”
I laugh, but he doesn’t. Not quite.
“I’ve spent months watching you leave pieces of a life in this house and then gather yourself up at eleven o’clock and go back down the hill.” His hand tightens around mine. “I would like you to stop going home.”
My heart thumps, and he hears it. Of course he does.
“I am not asking you to give up the cottage,” he says quickly.
“It was your grandmother’s. It’s yours, and I would never ask that.
I have considered the practical arrangements.
There is ample room here for anything you wish to bring, although I would like to discuss the kitchen before you make unilateral decisions about—”
“Yes,” I say.
He stops. “You haven’t heard the arguments.”
“Yes.”
“There are four of them. One is quite good.”
“I said yes, Julian.”
He stares at me, and I start laughing. Not because it’s funny, exactly, but because he looks genuinely astonished, which is something I still don’t get to see very often.
Apparently a man can live four hundred years and still be surprised when the woman who has been leaving her shoes by his back door for months agrees to leave them there permanently.
“You didn’t think about it,” he says.
“I have been thinking about it.”
“When?”
“Every time I have to drive down that hill at eleven o’clock.”
“Right,” he says. “I would like to give you the fourth argument anyway.”
“I already said yes.”
“You said yes to the drawers.” He sets down the glass he hasn’t been drinking from all evening.
“This one is separate. I have been thinking about it since February. If I don’t say it now I’ll put it away again for another year.
I’ll be extremely reasonable about it, which you have unfortunately made impossible for me to enjoy. ”
Something goes tight under my ribs.
“I have had eleven names. I have had a great deal of time and almost nothing to spend it on. I have been careful with all of it, and I have nothing whatsoever to show for the care.” He looks down at me, and my heart starts to race.
“I love you,” he says quietly, “and I would like to marry you.”
The candles keep going. Out past the window, two thousand people are quietly having an ordinary evening.
“That’s definitely the good one,” I manage to say finally.
“I thought so.”
“You put it fourth.”
“I put it last,” he says. “You of all people should recognize the difference.”
And that’s when I start crying, in a dining room with eighteen chairs in it, holding the hand of a man who cannot taste a dinner he spent weeks learning to make. He doesn’t tell me not to. He simply waits.
“Yes,” I say, as soon as I can talk again.
Something changes in his face. He looks at me for another second, and then back towards the table and the eighteen chairs and the two places. At the remains of a dinner he couldn’t taste and couldn’t make alone.
Then he looks at me again.
“There wasn’t a gap tonight,” he says, and I squeeze his hand.
There never was a gap between us.