46. Jake
JAKE
I have given exactly one speech in my life, at Emily's funeral, and I swore I would never give another one. Love makes liars of all of us.
I stood under the arbor with my hands doing something useless at my sides, wiping themselves on jeans that were already clean, and looked at the thing we had built.
It had taken four days of framing, two days of arguing with Deacon about the angle of the joints, and one entire afternoon lost to Marcus insisting the whole structure needed a second coat before the lights could go up.
The old trellis was gone, every rotted inch of it hauled to the dump in the bed of my truck, and in its place stood a wooden arch wide enough to walk two people through side by side, the apple tree grown right up into the framing on one side like it had been waiting years for something to lean on.
String lights ran the length of it, warm and gold, and underneath the crossbeam, right at eye level where nobody could miss it, hung a single sheet of paper in a cheap frame Noah had picked out himself at the hardware store because he said the fancy ones looked like something you'd hang a dead person's picture in.
"You're doing the thing again," Noah said, from the step where he sat swinging his legs.
"What thing?"
"The hand thing. Where you wipe them on your pants even though they're not dirty."
"I don't have a thing."
"You have a thing." He said it with the flat authority of a boy who had spent six years watching me closely enough to catalog my nervous habits better than I knew them myself. "Grandma Carol says it means you're about to do something brave and stupid at the same time."
"Grandma Carol says a lot of things."
"She's usually right, though."
I could not argue with that, so I didn't. Deacon leaned against the fence post with his arms crossed, watching the last of the lights flicker on with the satisfied expression of a man who had spent three days building something he fully intended to take credit for at every dinner party for the rest of his life.
"You've got maybe ten minutes," he said. "Carol just texted. She's got Lily loaded up with a basket and a story about pie filling that wouldn't fool a golden retriever, and they're two streets over."
"Ten minutes."
"Give or take. You planning on using them to stand there wiping your hands, or you got words somewhere in that head of yours?"
"I have words."
"Good ones?"
"I guess we're about to find out."
He clapped me once on the shoulder, hard enough to mean it, and walked himself out through the gate to wait on the far side where he wouldn't be seen, and Noah slid off the step and came to stand next to me under the lights, small and steady in a way that still undid me every time I let myself notice it.
"You nervous?" he asked.
"A little."
"Don't be. You already said the important part to us. This is just saying it again, louder."
I looked down at him, at the sketchbook still tucked under his arm because he refused to leave the house without it these days, and thought about every version of this moment I had rehearsed alone in my truck over the past two weeks, and how none of them had sounded half as steady as one six-year-old standing under a string of borrowed lights telling me I already knew how to do this.
"Go wait by the fence with Deacon," I told him. "This part I have to do myself."
He didn't argue. He just squeezed my hand once, quick, the way he'd started doing lately instead of the words he still sometimes couldn't find, and went.
I heard them before I saw them. Lily's voice carried the way it always did, bright and certain and entirely too loud for a girl supposedly on a covert apple mission, already narrating something about the goose to a grandmother who was walking noticeably slower than usual, stalling on purpose, buying every last second she could.
"Mama, there's lights in our garden."
"I see them, bug."
"Are they for us?"
"I don't know."
They came through the gate together, and I watched Aria's face change in the space of about two seconds, confusion sliding into something else entirely as she took in the arbor, the lights, the apple tree grown into the framing, the whole transformed shape of a place that had been nothing but a broken trellis and months of avoidance the last time she'd really looked at it.
Lily saw me first and lit up like a struck match.
"Jake!" She dropped Carol's hand and sprinted the last ten feet, and I caught her out of pure reflex and swung her up, and over her shoulder I watched Aria stop walking entirely, one hand pressed flat against her own chest like she was checking to see if it was still doing its job.
"What is this," she said, not really a question, more like she was testing whether the words would hold her weight.
"This is me," I said, "finally doing the thing I should have done a long time ago."
Carol materialized at Lily's shoulder with the ease of a woman who had planned this exact handoff three times in her head.
"Come on, sweet girl. Let's go find those apples for real this time. I hear there's a very good one on the tree by Bev's fence."
She led Lily off toward the far side of the yard, close enough to still see everything, far enough to give us the room the moment needed, and Deacon and Noah stood at the gate in silhouette, watching without pretending not to.
Aria still hadn't moved. "Jake. What is going on?"
"I built you a gate," I said. "I know that sounds like a strange sentence. I've been rehearsing better ones for two weeks and none of them survived contact with you actually standing here."
"A gate."
"An arbor, technically, if you want to be accurate about it, and Deacon will absolutely correct you if you call it a gate in front of him, but yes.
I took the thing you tripped over the first day I ever saw you, the thing that's been broken since before either of us knew the other one existed, and I turned it into something that's supposed to still be standing long after we're both old and difficult and arguing about whose turn it is to prune the apple tree. "
She laughed, short and startled, the kind of laugh that comes out before a person decides whether they're allowed to. "That is the strangest apology I have ever heard in my life."
"It gets stranger. Deacon wanted to hang a banner off the water tower.
Big letters, easy to read from the road.
When I said no, he moved on to skywriting, and when I said no to that, he suggested a mariachi band, on the theory that nothing says I'm sorry like brass instruments.
Carol vetoed all of it and told me if I turned your garden into a parade for the whole street, you'd think I'd lost my mind instead of found it.
So instead you get a very expensive piece of carpentry and a man who has rehearsed this in his truck more times than he'll ever admit to Deacon. "
She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, half laugh and half something closer to tears, and shook her head like she couldn't decide which one was going to win.
"I have an actual speech," I said. "I want you to know that in advance, so you're not blindsided by how bad the first draft was before Carol made me cut the part where I compared us to a house frame."
"That might be worse than the gate."
"It's close." I stepped nearer, close enough that the lights caught in her eyes, close enough that I could see her hands were shaking a little where they'd come up to fold across herself, an old defensive habit I recognized because I have one just like it.
"I've given exactly one speech in my life.
At Emily's funeral. I stood up in front of two hundred people and told them she was the kind of woman who made a whole room feel like it had been waiting for her its whole life, and I meant every word, and I swore afterward I would never do that again.
Standing in front of people and saying the true thing out loud costs too much.
I decided it was safer to just build things instead.
A fence. A treehouse. A whole career out of making sure nothing I love ever falls down around me. "
"Jake."
"Let me finish, because if I stop now I don't know if I'll find the nerve again." I took a breath.
"You showed up in the one place I'd spent two years making safe, and you were funny, and difficult, and entirely too observant, and I fell in love with you before I let myself admit that's what was happening, because falling in love with someone means eventually standing at the edge of losing them, and I already know exactly what that costs.
I know because I watched Lily fall out of that tree and for four seconds I lived the whole rest of my life without either of you in it, and it was so much worse than anything I felt the night Emily actually died, and instead of telling you that, I told you I couldn't do this.
That was a lie. I can do this. I have just been too much of a coward to say so out loud in a way that couldn't be taken back. "
Her hand had come up to her mouth. She didn't say anything, so I kept going, because Deacon had told me if I stopped to wait for permission I would stand there until morning.
"Noah made that." I nodded up at the framed drawing hanging from the crossbeam, all four of us under the tree, our outlines running together at the edges the way he'd been drawing us for months before I had the courage to make it true.
"He told me to hang it here so you'd know none of this is new. We already drew it. You just hadn't seen it yet."
I reached up and touched the corner of the frame, steadying my own hands more than the picture.
"I know you signed a contract. I know there's a job and a plane ticket and a whole life waiting on the other side of a schedule I don't have any right to ask you to give up.
I'm not asking you to give it up. I'm asking you to let me be part of however you build it, whatever shape it ends up taking, here or three weeks out of every four or wherever it goes.
I built you an arbor because I am better with my hands than with my mouth, but I needed you to hear the mouth part too, so here it is, plainly, so there's no mistaking it for a metaphor about wood. "
"Jake." Her voice cracked on my name, wet and small.
Somewhere behind us Lily was narrating an entire fictional apple harvest to a goose that had wandered up from the marina to supervise, and Noah and Deacon stood silent at the gate pretending very hard not to watch, and none of it mattered half as much as the look on her face right now, caught somewhere between the woman who had signed a contract three weeks ago and the woman standing under lights I had strung with my own hands because I did not know how else to say what I was about to say.
"I do not just want you to stay," I said. "I want to build the rest of it with you. All of it."
She did not say anything.
Not yet.