23. Nathan Sr #2
The ring is simple. A clean stone, bright and steady, set in a band I could actually picture on her hand for the rest of our lives. I knew the second I saw it that anything louder would’ve been a lie. Athena isn’t spectacle. She’s warmth with teeth. She’s the hand at the center of a storm.
She stares at it, then at me.
“This is not how I pictured you doing this,” she says, voice trembling around a laugh.
I glance around the room. “You mean the deluxe recovery suite didn’t scream romance.”
That gets the laugh out of her, wet and helpless and beautiful enough to break me open. She presses her fingers to her mouth, then drags them away and shakes her head like she still doesn’t trust what she’s seeing.
“I don’t have a speech,” I tell her. “Not a polished one. I’m bruised, I’m in a hospital bed, and if I try to kneel right now, I’ll probably end up back on morphine. So you’re getting the truth.”
Her eyes lock on mine.
“I love you,” I say. “I love you in all the ways that matter and in several ways that are absolutely not appropriate for this floor. I love your mind, your mouth, your impossible strength, and the way you made a life where there should’ve only been wreckage.
I love the child sleeping three feet from us, and I hate every year I missed, but I’m done hating years I can’t get back when I could spend that time building the ones ahead. ”
Athena’s chin wobbles once, and she hates that, I can tell. I keep going anyway.
“I want the whole thing,” I say quietly. “I want mornings and school forms and rent or mortgages and bad takeout and old age and whatever fights we survive after this one. I want your hand in mine when nothing is happening, not only when everything is. And if you’ll let me, I want to marry you.”
She stares at me for one long beat, then another.
Her voice, when it comes, is very soft. “You really brought me a ring in a hospital.”
“I did.”
“You absolute lunatic.”
I huff out a laugh. “I’ve been called worse.”
She laughs too, and now the tears are loose and real, sliding down her cheeks while she tries not to make a sound big enough to wake Ivy.
I shift forward as much as my ribs allow and hold the box out farther. “Athena.”
That does it.
She covers her face for a second, then drops her hands and looks at me with so much love in her face that it feels like being hit clean through the chest. “Yes,” she whispers.
I blink. “Yes?”
“Yes, Nathan,” she says, stronger now, smiling and crying at the same time. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
Relief goes through me so hard I almost laugh like a fool. I take the ring out with fingers that are a little less steady than I’d prefer and hold my hand out for hers.
Athena gives it to me without hesitation.
I slide the ring onto her finger slowly, watching it settle there like it already belonged. She looks down at it then back at me, and there’s a kind of wonder in her face that I know I’ll want burned into memory for the rest of my life.
“You agreed to marry me,” I murmur, still a little stunned.
She lifts her left hand, turning it slightly so the stone catches the low hospital light. “Looks like it.”
I catch her wrist gently and press my mouth to her knuckles, right above the ring. From the recliner, Ivy makes a sleepy little sound and shifts without waking.
Athena and I both freeze, then look at her, then at each other.
Her smile turns helpless. “We just got engaged next to our sleeping daughter.”
I look at Ivy, at Athena, at the ring on her hand, and the full absurd tenderness of it nearly undoes me.
“Honestly,” I say, “that sounds exactly right.”
Athena leans in carefully and kisses me, soft and deep and laughing a little into my mouth. When she pulls back, she rests her forehead against mine and closes her eyes.
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I echo.
And in the recliner beside us, Ivy sleeps through the moment that changes all of our lives.
By the end of the second week, I’m discharged.
I heal at Athena’s pace, which is to say I’m allowed to think I’m in charge as long as I continue doing exactly what she says.
Daniel drops in often enough to remain insufferable, Maya appears whenever anyone needs backup, and somewhere in the middle of all that, our lives begin arranging themselves into something recognizably domestic.
I sign the lease on a short-term furnished place in Back Bay first, since it’s close enough to Beacon Harbor for follow-ups and close enough to Ivy’s new school not to make mornings absurd. Athena insists on seeing it before anything is final. We go together.
She stands in the living room with Ivy beside her, both of them turning slowly in a beam of afternoon light while I pretend not to care whether they like it.
“The kitchen is better,” Athena says.
“The kitchen is excellent,” I correct.
Ivy runs down the hall, opens a door, then runs back. “My room has a window seat.”
The move itself is messy and fast and strangely happy.
Maya comes armed with labels and has opinions on everything.
Daniel arrives with coffee and a warning not to lift anything heavier than a lamp, then immediately lifts three boxes himself and complains about my taste in books.
Athena organizes the kitchen first, which I take personally until she points out that people need plates before philosophy.
Ivy transfers into the Boston branch the following Monday.
The first morning she wears the new uniform, she stands in the hallway while Athena fixes her collar and I crouch to tie her shoes. She looks between us like she’s checking the picture for continuity.
“You’re both coming,” she says.
“Yes,” Athena replies.
“Obviously,” I add.
She nods once, satisfied, then lets us walk her to the car.
At the school entrance, she takes two steps away then turns back and asks, “So this is my real school now.”
Athena looks at her, then at me, then back at Ivy. “If you want it to be.”
Ivy thinks about that for all of one second. “I do.”
Then she walks inside without another word, brave and steady and entirely herself. Athena stands beside me on the pavement after the doors close. For a moment neither of us says anything.