Epilogue #3
“I'm not going to get down on one knee on this porch,” he said slowly.
“It'd be a performance, and we've had enough between us that was performed, and you'd see right through it anyway.
So I'm just going to say the true thing, the way you taught me to.
I'm not going anywhere. I bought a boat I can't leave and I joined a life that's rooted in this town and I gave my mother your name this morning before I'd asked you whether I had the right to. I want to marry you, Sloane. Not as a grand gesture. As the next true thing in front of us, and then the one after that, for the rest of them. I want to marry you because I love you, and the time we were apart gutted me in a way nothing else ever could. I want to marry you because you truly are the very best thing that has ever happened to me and ever will.”
She didn't cry, and he loved her for it, because he'd learned that Sloane Mercer's stillness in a big moment wasn't the absence of feeling, but the total weight of it held steady.
She reached across the space between the chairs and took his hand, both of hers around it, the way she'd held the coffee mug on the dock the day she told him she'd kissed him knowing it was coming, and she turned it over and laced her fingers through his.
“Yes,” she said. “Not because you asked so romantically.
You didn't; that was barely a proposal. We're going to have to tell people a better version.” He laughed, and she held on tighter.
“Yes, because I spent four years guarding a door against the truth, and you walked up and made me open it, and it was the worst thing anybody ever did to me and it set me free, and I have decided that's the man I want across the table for the rest of my mornings. The one who tells me the truth even when it costs him everything. Especially then. Yes, because I love you too, Ethan Vale. Our time apart told me so much more than our time together. Yes, Ethan, I want to marry you.”
He pulled her up out of the chair and into him and held her on the porch with the inlet going dark and silver below them, and over her shoulder, across the water, he could see slip seventeen and the boat he was going to spend years fixing, and beyond it the lights of the docks coming on, and somewhere north of town eight hundred acres of someone else's sin waiting to be turned into the team's future, and his family five hours up the coast packing bags to come meet the woman in his arms, and all of it, for once, in the same place, on the same night, belonging to the same man who finally got to say he loved her and wasn't leaving her.
“We'll tell them a better version,” he agreed, into her hair. “We'll tell them I was smooth.”
“Nobody who's met you will believe it.”
“Tell them anyway.”
And she laughed, the real one, the one he'd be working to earn for the rest of his life and would consider every single one of them a good morning's work, and the marina settled into its evening around the two of them, and the light in her kitchen window burned out across the water toward his boat, and his boat's light burned back, two lights on across a dark basin that didn't mean waiting anymore, didn't mean a promise held open against a decision, didn't mean anything now but that two people were home, and on their way to each other, and done steering by anything but each other's shore.
Ethan and Sloane Aren’t Finished
There’s one more piece of their story, and it’s yours free.