Chapter 11
HANNAH
The last night sneaks up on me.
That’s the only way to describe it. One moment I have five days left and then I have three and then I’m standing on my deck in the early evening watching the sun do its signature Outer Banks thing over the water, all copper and rose and completely indifferent to the fact that tomorrow I pack my car and drive eleven hours back to my real life, and I feel the deadline of it in my chest like a closing argument I’m not ready to make.
Cruz is beside me at the railing.
We’ve been here for an hour, easy and quiet, the way we’ve learned to be.
His sketchbook open, my book face-down, neither of us reading or drawing, both of us just present in the particular way of people who have figured out that the other person’s company is enough without requiring it to be anything else.
I’ve been thinking all day about what I want to say.
I’ve been, characteristically, building the case.
Here is what the evidence supports:
Five days. That’s all this has been. Five days of coffee and beach walks and a dinner that was absolutely a date and a man who kissed me like a question and held me like an answer and told me about his heart with the same directness he brings to everything, no performance, no angle, just Cruz being exactly who he is and trusting me to do something reasonable with it.
Five days is not enough data for a verdict.
Except.
I have been a lawyer for twenty-four years and I know the difference between insufficient evidence and a verdict you’re afraid to reach. I know when I’m asking for more time because I genuinely need it and when I’m asking for more time because I already know what I think and it scares me.
I already know what I think.
“I looked up the drive,” I say.
Cruz turns from the water.
“Omaha to Denver.” I keep my eyes on the horizon because it’s easier to say true things that way, I’ve known this since the beach. “Eight hours and change. Depending on traffic, which is its own variable.” I pause. “I’ve driven longer for worse reasons.”
Complete silence beside me.
“My firm is case-heavy through October,” I continue, in the tone I use when I’m laying out terms that are non-negotiable but fair.
“But I have flexibility on Fridays if I’m organized about it, which I am always organized about it, so long weekends are structurally possible.
” Another pause. “And there’s a direct flight that’s an hour and fifteen minutes, which frankly is the more intelligent option for anything under three weeks. ”
Still nothing.
I finally look at him.
Cruz is staring at me with an expression I haven’t seen before. Completely unguarded. The charm and the ease and even the quiet certainty stripped back to something underneath all of it that is raw and young and real, and his jaw is doing something complicated and his eyes are —
bright, actually— which I’m going to be a professional about.
“Hannah—” His voice comes out rougher than usual.
“I’m not a summer fling person,” I tell him.
Straight, clear, the way I say things I mean completely.
“I don’t know how to be. I’ve tried to be, this week, I told myself this was a contained thing with a clean ending and that was the reasonable approach and I—” I stop.
Start again. “I can’t do the clean ending, Cruz.
I don’t have it in me. So if that’s what this is for you, I need to know that now so I can—”
He kisses me.
Not soft this time, not careful. It’s immediate and certain and both hands in my hair and I feel the whole sentence dissolve somewhere between the intention and the delivery.
When he pulls back he’s breathing like he ran here.
“I have been trying to figure out,” he says, low and deliberate, forehead against mine, “how to tell you that I’m already in love with you without making you run.”
The ocean.
The copper light.
My heart doing something completely unauthorized behind my ribs.
“Cruz.” My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
“I know,” he says. “Five days. I know how it sounds. I know what the rational case against it looks like. You’re a lawyer, you’ve probably already built it, you’ve probably got counterarguments for my counterarguments.
” His thumbs move at my jaw. “I don’t care.
I’m in love with you and I’ve been in love with you since you handed me back a fire extinguisher like it was a stapler and went back to your book and I have not stopped being in love with you for a single consecutive minute since. ”
I laugh.
Actually laugh.
Surprise comes out of me, loud and real. The kind that has no dignity in it.
Cruz pulls back enough to look at my face and his expression shifts into something that is definitely going to undo me if I’m not careful.
“You’re laughing,” he says.
“I’m—” I press a hand to my mouth. “I’m a forty-eight year old woman with two daughters and a law firm and seventeen years of careful, practiced self-sufficiency.” I get it under control. Mostly. “You’re going to have to do significantly better than that to scare me.”
He stares at me for a moment.
Then: “Marry me.”
“Cruz.”
“Too much?”
“Extremely.”
“Okay.” He grins— the real one, the full one, the one that has been causing problems for my cardiovascular system since day one. “Denver first. Marriage is a Q2 conversation.”
“That’s a very architectural way to approach a relationship.”
“Phase one, phase two.” He pulls me back in. “I’m a planner.”
“You burned your grill on purpose.”
“For content. Completely different context.” His arms settle around me easy and warm and I rest my chin on his shoulder and look at the water over his arm and feel… full. Simply, unexpectedly, completely full.
“I’m going to tell Maya tonight,” he says, quieter now. “About the procedure.”
“Good.”
“Will you be there? When I call her.”
“I’ll be right here,” I say.
He exhales. Long, slow, the way a person breathes when they’ve been holding something for a long time and finally don’t have to.
We stay at the railing until the copper goes rose and the rose goes gray and the first stars show up over the water doing what stars have always done. They’re so completely indifferent to the small human things happening beneath them and somehow, because of that, making those things feel more real.
Cruz takes my picture at some point in the evening.
Not for content. His phone goes straight back into his pocket, no caption, no post. He just looks at it for a moment with an expression he doesn’t try to moderate and then looks at me and then at the picture again, like he’s checking that the two match.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He puts his phone away. “Just keeping it.”
I think about a thirty-four year old man with a sketchbook and a heart that needs a small repair and two point three million strangers who know the performed version of him and absolutely no idea about the real one.
The one who slows down when he runs past you.
The one who leaves wine on a railing without asking for anything back, who asks before he kisses you and means it every time.
I think about driving eight hours through Nebraska for this person.
I’m going to do it. Obviously. I decided approximately three days ago.
Mia calls at nine.
“How’s the vacation?” she asks.
I’m sitting on Cruz’s deck. He’s inside making tea —correctly, no fire involved— and through the window I can see him moving around the kitchen with the ease of a person comfortable in small spaces, comfortable in his own company, comfortable with me in a way that still catches me off guard with its completeness.
“Good,” I tell her. “Really good.”
A pause. Mia has radar too… she gets it from me. “Mom. What happened.”
“I met someone.”
Silence. Then, at a volume that makes me pull the phone from my ear: “Mom!”
“He’s lovely,” I say. “He’s also thirty-four, so prepare yourself.”
The sound she makes is indescribable. I’m going to treasure it.
“Cara is going to absolutely lose her mind,” Mia says.
“I’m aware. I’m looking forward to it.”
Cruz comes back out with two mugs and raises an eyebrow at whatever my face is doing. I mouth my daughter and he mouths which one and I mouth the loud one and he grins and sits down beside me and puts his hand over mine on the armrest, unhurried, easy, like it belongs there.
Because it does.
“Tell me everything,” Mia demands in my ear.
So I do.
Not all of it, not yet. But the shape of it. The grill fire and a fire extinguisher and a man who looked at me like I was art and had the audacity to mean it.
Mia cries a little. She gets that from me too.
Later, after Maya’s call, which goes the way it needs to go, messy and loving and full of Cruz saying I know, I know, I should have told you, I’m fine, I promise I’m fine while Maya cries and I sit beside him with my hand on his back and do not say a word because this is his to do.
And finally we’re back on the deck in the dark.
His head is tipped back. Mine too. The stars are doing their ancient indifferent beautiful thing.
“She wants to meet you,” he says.
“I gathered.”
“She said, and I’m quoting directly, that anyone who googles a man’s cardiac surgeon within twenty minutes of finding out about his heart condition is the only kind of person she’d trust with her brother.”
“She sounds extremely intelligent.”
“She’s the best person I know.” A pause. “She’s going to have competition for that now.”
I don’t say anything. I let it exist the way he taught me. Without counterargument, without case-building, without reaching for the rational objection to something that is simply and completely true.
He takes my hand.
“Thank you,” he says, quietly.
“For what specifically.”
“All of it. The extinguisher. The wine you accepted. The morning coffee. The not running.” His thumb moves across my knuckles. “For sitting next to me when I called Maya.”
“Cruz.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to be in Denver in three weeks.”
He goes still for a half second. “Yeah?”
“The Friday after your procedure, assuming your surgeon’s outcomes data continues to perform as advertised.” I look at the stars. “I’ll need somewhere to stay.”
“I have a guest room,” he says, with elaborate casualness.
“I won’t be using it.”
He brings my hand up and presses his mouth to my knuckles, warm and certain, and I feel it everywhere.
“She only wanted a month of solitude,” he says quietly, to the stars, to himself, to no one in particular.
“She got four days,” I say, dry as the Outer Banks sand.
“Best four days of my life.”
I look at him.
He’s already looking at me.
“Mine too,” I say.
And I mean it the way I mean very few things. Completely, without qualification, without the counter-argument.
Just the verdict, clean and clear.
His.