Chapter 3
Marisol
He proposed to me on a Tuesday, with a sleeping toddler on his hip and the worst delivery in the recorded history of marriage proposals, and I will treasure it for the rest of my life.
It was nine at night. I was in my pajamas — the embarrassing ones, the flannel ones with the little foxes, because I'd given up on the day around eight — and I was eating cereal for dinner standing over the sink like a raccoon when someone knocked on my door.
I almost didn't answer. Nobody knocks at nine. Then I looked through the peephole and saw Beckett Holloway standing in my hallway holding a sleeping Eli, and I had the door open before I'd decided to open it.
"Beckett? Is everything okay? Is Eli—"
"He's fine. He's asleep. He's fine." Beckett shifted the kid higher on his shoulder.
He looked — wrecked isn't the right word.
He looked like a man standing at the edge of something high, working up to a jump.
"Can I — can I come in. For a minute. I have to say a thing and if I don't say it tonight I'm gonna lose my nerve, and it's gonna take me a while to say it, so. "
"Yeah. Yes. Of course." I stepped back. He came in, ducking under my doorframe, and stood in the middle of my tiny living room looking enormous and terrified, this big man and the small boy draped over him, both of them out of place and somehow exactly right in my apartment full of plants and clinic flyers and a couch I'd bought used.
He didn't sit. He stood there. He shifted his weight. Eli sighed in his sleep and burrowed in.
"Beckett, you're scaring me a little. What's—"
"I heard about your visa," he said.
Everything stopped.
"Gemma," I said. "Gemma told you."
"Don't be mad at her. She wasn't gossiping.
She was — she did the thing where you tell somebody something because somebody's gotta.
I'd have done the same. She did right." He took a breath.
"I heard about your visa. And I — okay. Okay, I'm just gonna say it, I practiced it in the truck and I already forgot the practiced version, so I'm just gonna say it. "
And then this man, this calm methodical man who could track a deer through a thunderstorm, who I'd never once seen rattled, started to talk fast, the words tumbling out like he'd shaken them loose and now couldn't stop them.
"I need help with Eli. I've needed it for three years and I'm too — I don't ask.
I don't know how to ask. But I'm drowning, Mari, real quiet, where nobody can tell, and he's getting bigger and the questions are getting harder and it's just me, it's just always me, and I can't — I'm scared all the time.
I'm scared I'm getting it wrong. And he loves you.
He says your name in his sleep. He asked if you could come to Saturday, which isn't a real thing, Saturday's not an event, but he wanted you at it anyway.
And you love him. I've watched you love him for a year and a half.
And you need to stay. And I need help. And I'm thinking. Maybe."
He stopped. Swallowed. Looked at the floor, then made himself look at me.
"Maybe we could help each other."
I stood very still in my fox pajamas with my heart somewhere up in my throat.
"It'd be real on paper," he said, faster now, panicking now, because I hadn't said anything and he was filling the silence with terms like a man stacking sandbags against a flood.
"I want to be clear about all of it. Separate rooms. You'd have your own room, your own everything, your own life.
No expectations. None. I'm not — this isn't me trying to — it's not like that.
You'd keep your job, your kids at the clinic, your whole life, just here, where it's supposed to be, instead of on a plane.
And Eli gets — he gets someone. Someone who's not just me trying my best and failing half the—"
"Stop," I said.
He stopped. His face shut down, bracing for the no.
"You're not failing," I said. "Beckett. Look at me.
You are not failing him. Do you understand that?
That boy is the most loved child in that entire clinic and I have seen a lot of loved children.
You think you're failing because you do it alone and scared, but the scared is the love.
You'd have to love something an enormous amount to be that scared of getting it wrong. "
His jaw worked. For a second I thought the unflappable Beckett Holloway was going to cry in my living room, and I think if he had I'd have lost it entirely, but he held it, the way he holds everything.
"That's the part," he said, rough. "That's the part I can't — I came here to offer you a lifeline. You. You're the one getting deported, you're the one in trouble, and you just — you stood there and tried to rescue me."
And that's what undid me. Right there. Not the proposal.
The fact that this man had walked into my apartment to save my life and was embarrassed that I'd noticed he needed saving too.
That he genuinely believed, all the way down, that he was the one with nothing to offer, when he was standing there holding the most precious thing in the world and offering to share it with me.
My eyes filled. I didn't fight it.
"Yes," I said.
He blinked. "What?"
"Yes, Beckett. Yes. I'll marry you."
He stared at me like I'd spoken a language he didn't know. "You — are you sure? You don't have to. You should think about it, there's other—"
"There's no other options. Ivy gave me the whole board.
This is the cleanest one and it's the only one that doesn't bankrupt me or send me away.
And —" I stopped. Started again, because he'd been honest with me and he deserved the same.
"And it's you, and it's Eli, and if I'm going to do something this big and this strange with anyone in the world, I'd want it to be the two of you.
That's not nothing. That's — Beckett, that's actually a lot. "
"Oh," he said. Like Eli says it. Exactly like Eli says it.
They'd lived together so long they'd started to sound alike, and I noticed it in that moment and filed it away in the part of my heart that was, even then, even with the careful terms hanging in the air between us, starting to claim them both.
"Yeah," I said. "Oh."
He let out a breath like he'd been holding it for an hour. Then, very quietly: "Okay. Okay. Then we should — there's terms. We should write down the terms."
"You want to do paperwork right now? It's nine-thirty and you have a sleeping child on you."
"He sleeps like a rock once he's down. And I'm a — I like things clear. If we're gonna do this I want it clear so neither of us ever has to wonder. Is that — can we?"
"Put him on the couch," I said. "I'll get a notepad."
So that's how I ended up at my own kitchen table at nine-forty on a Tuesday night, in fox pajamas, negotiating a marriage with a biker while his nephew slept on my secondhand couch, and somehow it was the most romantic night of my life, and neither of us would have called it that, and both of us would have been lying.
We laid it out like a business merger.
"Separate bedrooms," he said, and I wrote it down. "I'll take the couch till we sort out the second room. It's an office now, full of junk, I'll clear it out."
"You will not take the couch, you're the size of a refrigerator, you'll wreck your back. We'll figure out the room."
"Shared parenting," he said. "Real shared. I don't want you to feel like a — like hired help. He's ours. If you say yes to this, he's yours too. That's the deal. I'm not asking you to be a nanny. I'm asking you to be his—" He stopped. The word mother sat there, unsaid, too big for a Tuesday.
"His family," I said, gently. "I'd be his family."
"Yeah." Rough again. "His family."
"Two-year minimum," I said, writing. "For the immigration timeline. They watch for marriages that dissolve too fast. We'd need to be solid for at least two years before anything changes, paperwork-wise."
"Two years," he agreed. "And full honesty.
That's my one — that's the one I need. Whatever else, we don't lie to each other.
Not about the kid, not about money, not about anything.
If something's wrong we say it. I've had enough of people I love disappearing without warning.
I can't do quiet. I need the truth even when it's bad. Especially when it's bad."
I looked up from the notepad. There was a whole grief in that sentence, the size of a sister, the size of a mother he'd never mentioned, the size of every person who'd ever left this man without telling him why.
"Full honesty," I said. "I promise you that. I'm the worst liar you've ever met anyway. I have a tell. My whole face does a thing."
The corner of his mouth went up. "I know. I've seen it. You did it about the carrots."
"You noticed that?"
"I notice everything," he said simply. "It's the job."
We shook on it. He put out his hand across my kitchen table, formal, and I put mine in it, and his hand swallowed mine completely, warm and rough and careful, and there was a current that ran straight up my arm and lodged somewhere behind my sternum, and I watched his eyes flicker, just slightly, which meant he felt it too, and we both very deliberately did not say anything about it.
Separate rooms. No expectations.
We shook on it, and neither of us let go quite as fast as we should have.
The town found out within forty-eight hours, because of course it did.
Ivy filed the paperwork and was, professionally, delighted, and personally, gave me a long look over her glasses that said interesting and said nothing out loud, which from Ivy is practically a soliloquy.
Nadia found me at the diner and hugged me so hard she lifted me off the stool. "A wedding," she said, glowing, one hand on her pregnant belly. "We're getting a wedding. Diesel cried when I told him. He's so happy. We're all so happy."
Gemma just looked at me across the clinic with an expression of profound, unbearable smugness and mouthed you're welcome and went back to charting.
And then there was Knox.
Knox was at the clubhouse when Beckett brought me by to make it official with the brothers, this whole nerve-wracking thing where I stood in a room full of leather and had no idea if they'd accept me, and they did, instantly, warmly, like I'd been theirs all along — Wren hugged me, Briar burst into tears and announced we were cousins now, which I didn't entirely follow, and Maverick made a toast.
But Knox. Knox, the president, the widower, the one with the still water eyes — Knox just looked at the two of us, at Beckett standing close to me without seeming to notice he was standing close to me, at the way I'd already started handing Beckett things before he asked for them — Knox looked at us, and raised one eyebrow, slow, and there was a whole knowing in it.
He didn't say a word.
He didn't have to. That eyebrow said: I see exactly where this is going, even if the two of you don't.
I'd find out, in the weeks that came, that he was right.
But that night I drove home to my apartment for the last few nights it would be mine, and I lay in bed, and I thought about a current that ran up my arm and an eyebrow that knew something I didn't, and a man who'd tried to rescue me and gotten embarrassed when I rescued him back.
Separate rooms, I reminded myself.
No expectations.
I'd signed it. We'd shaken on it.
I lay awake a long time, and I'll be honest with you, because I'd promised that man honesty and I'm trying to be honest with myself too:
Even then, the terms were already in trouble.