10. Clara
CLARA
Three weeks after the night on the restaurant terrace, I know something is coming.
I don't say anything. I'm not even sure I'm supposed to know—except that Callum is meticulous and controlled about everything in his life, and lately there have been cracks in that control so subtle that anyone else would miss them.
A phone call taken in the hallway with the door pulled shut, his voice dropping to a murmur when I pass.
A velvet box, dark navy, glimpsed on his dresser for approximately four seconds before his hand closed over it and slid it into his jacket pocket with the smooth ease of a man who'd practiced the motion.
He didn't see me see it.
I pretended I hadn't.
That was three days ago, and since then I've been carrying the not-knowing around like something fragile, terrified to press on it in case I'm wrong. In case I've misread the whole thing and built something enormous out of a jewelry box that turns out to be cufflinks.
But my heart knows. It's been thumping an irregular, anticipatory rhythm since Tuesday, and by Friday afternoon, when Callum appears in the kitchen doorway with his jacket on and his car keys in hand and says, "Get your coat," in that quiet, absolute way of his, my stomach drops straight through the floor.
"Where are we going?"
"For a drive."
I study his face for a tell. His expression gives me nothing—composed, faintly warm, those blue eyes steady on mine. The jaw is relaxed, not clenched. He's not nervous. Of course he isn't. Callum Reid doesn't do nervous.
"That's it? Just a drive?"
"Just a drive." The corner of his mouth lifts fractionally. "Get your coat, Clara."
I get my coat.
The city thins out as he drives, the familiar grid of the financial district giving way to wider roads, then to the elevated stretch above the reservoir where the trees have started to flame with early autumn color.
The sky ahead of us has gone amber and rose at the edges, the sun dropping toward the horizon in that unhurried way it has on clear October evenings, like it's in no particular rush.
I watch him drive. His hands rest easy on the wheel, one at twelve and one low at his hip, the dark ink peeking past his rolled cuff. He hasn't said anything since we got in the car, and neither have I, and it should be awkward but it isn't. It never is, with him.
He turns off onto a gravel road I don't recognize, and my heart picks up.
The overlook is a flat-cleared stretch of ground at the end of the gravel road, nothing but a low split-rail fence between us and a sheer drop into the valley below.
The valley is on fire—gold and rust and deep arterial red, trees packed wall to wall for miles, and the city is a smear of silver light at the distant horizon, and the sky above all of it is the most extraordinary shade of pink I've ever seen.
It's the kind of view that makes you go quiet without deciding to.
There's no one else here.
I step out of the car and walk to the fence, and for a moment I just look, my breath clouding faintly in the cool air. I wrap my coat tighter around myself and don't say anything because there isn't anything to say.
"Come here," Callum says from behind me, and I turn to find he's already set up a blanket on the flattest stretch of ground, weighted at the corners with smooth stones someone clearly placed there with some forethought.
There's a low wooden board in the center serving as a makeshift table, and on it are containers I recognize—the same matte black ones he uses at home when he cooks, not the sleek takeout packaging from the places we've been to together.
Two enamel plates. A folded cloth napkin on each.
A bottle of wine already uncorked, breathing.
"You cooked," I say.
"I cooked."
I look at him. He looks back at me with that expression he has—steady, unbothered, faintly pleased with himself—and doesn't offer anything further.
I sit down on the blanket and tuck my knees up while he settles beside me, and he lifts the lids off the containers with the same unhurried efficiency he brings to everything.
It's braised short rib. Roasted root vegetables.
A crusty heel of bread wrapped in a cloth.
Simple, technically, and I've sat across white tablecloths from some of the best kitchens in the city with him over these past months, places with tasting menus and amuse-bouches and servers who recite provenance like a liturgy, and none of it has ever tasted like this.
The meat pulls apart with barely any pressure.
The vegetables are sweet and caramelized at the edges and soft through the center.
I eat more than I mean to, and I tell him so, and he just refills my wine without commenting.
We sit there while the light drops and the valley below us deepens from gold into something richer and darker, the colors intensifying in that last half hour before the sun actually goes.
I talk—about a paper I'm finishing—and he listens the way he always does, with his full attention, asking questions at exactly the right moments.
His shoulder is warm against mine. The wine is good.
The air smells like cold earth and dry leaves and whatever wood smoke is drifting up from somewhere far below in the valley.
At some point he picks up the plates and the containers, moving without announcement, and carries them back to the car. I hear the trunk close. Then nothing for a moment.
I stay facing the view, elbows on my knees, wine glass held loosely in both hands. The last of the pink has gone from the sky, replaced by a deep, clear blue at the top of the dome that is starting to shade toward purple. The first star is visible, faint, just above the tree line.
I hear the gravel behind me, his footsteps deliberate and unhurried. I hear them stop.
And then I hear nothing, and I feel the quality of the silence shift—something charged and held in it that wasn't there before—and I turn around.
He's on one knee.
The velvet box is open in his hand, and inside it is a ring—a diamond solitaire, clean and brilliant, catching the last of the light, surrounded by smaller stones in a setting that is elegant and serious and nothing like anything I would have picked for myself and absolutely everything I would have picked for myself.
My vision blurs immediately, which is mortifying, and I press my fingers to my mouth.
"Clara Fielding." His voice is low, even, that deep baritone that has settled itself somewhere inside my nervous system over the past months.
"You walked into my parents' house and upended every plan I'd made for how my life was going to go.
You're my stepsister and my best friend and the only person I've ever been certain about in my life. "
A tear slips down my cheek and I don't bother wiping it.
"I'm asking you to be my wife." He pauses, just a beat. "Say yes."
Not will you. Not a question, really. Just the certainty of it, laid out plain—and that is so completely, thoroughly him that I laugh through the tears, a wet, undignified sound.
"Yes," I manage. "Obviously yes."
He rises from his knee in one smooth motion, and his hands are on my face before the word has finished leaving my mouth, tilting me up, and when he kisses me it is nothing like the commanding, consuming kisses I've come to know. It's soft. Deliberate. Like he's marking the moment.
He slides the ring onto my finger, and I look down at it in the fading light, this dazzling, impossible thing on my hand.
"You planned this," I say.
"Everything I do is planned."
"You were so careful," I say against his chest, my arms around his ribs. "You really thought I didn't notice the box on your dresser Tuesday morning."
His chest rises and falls. His arms tighten slightly. "I knew you saw it."
I pull back to look up at him. "You did not."
"You have a very specific face you make when you're pretending not to have seen something." He looks entirely too satisfied with himself.
"I hate you."
"No you don't." He presses his mouth to my temple. "You're going to marry me."
The drive back is quieter than the drive out, a thick, warm silence that I sit inside with my ringed hand in my lap, turning it in the window light, watching it catch and scatter and catch again. Callum drives with one hand on the wheel and the other resting over mine, heavy and warm.
I think back to where everything started, I was sitting in a lecture hall watching milk soak through my shirt, panicked and humiliated and utterly alone.
Now I'm wearing a diamond ring and driving home with the man who is going to be my husband and also happens to be my stepbrother, and none of it is what I expected my life to look like, and all of it is exactly right.
Back at the apartment, we step inside and the city lights come through the floor-to-ceiling glass in long, soft panels, and Callum drops his keys on the counter and turns to me, and the quality in his eyes is something I don't see often—something unguarded and quiet and warm.
I reach up and push his jacket off his shoulders.
He watches me do it. He lets me, which is notable because Callum Reid lets very few things happen to him—he typically happens to things—but he stands still while I work the jacket down his arms and drop it over the back of the couch, and then I start on his shirt buttons from the top, deliberate, and he watches my hands with an expression that makes my throat tighten.
"My fiancée undressing me," he says, low.
"Your fiancée," I repeat, testing the sound of it.
"How's that feel?"
I finish the last button and press my palm flat against his chest, between the tattoos, feeling the steady, unhurried thud of his heart. "Terrifying," I say honestly. "Good terrifying."