Chapter Twenty
Mandy
Two years since Hawaii. Two years of Damon existing in some undefined space between boyfriend and ex-husband, a title neither of us had ever bothered to name out loud.
I'd been careful about that on purpose. Careful about him, in general, in a way I still caught myself being proud of some mornings and exhausted by on others.
He'd never once complained about the wait. Not once, in two full years, had he pushed for more than what I was willing to give him on any given day. I noticed that. I noticed everything now, the way you notice things about a person you're still deciding whether to trust completely.
This morning, sunlight pooled gold across my kitchen counter—the same slant of light I sometimes still thought about, from a different kitchen, a different morning, six years and a whole marriage ago.
I stood at the stove in one of his old shirts, which had somehow migrated into my closet sometime in the last two years without either of us commenting on it, flipping eggs without needing to think about the motion at all anymore.
"Two years." I slid a plate toward him without turning around, keeping my voice light. "You know that's longer than most people date before they even get engaged."
"I'm aware." I heard him reach into his jacket, hung over the back of the chair, and when I turned around, he was holding a small black box like it might detonate if he moved too fast. "Which is why I got you something."
"Damon." My eyebrow went up on its own.
"It's not what you think." He set the box on the counter between us and flipped it open. Two rings, plain platinum, no stone on either one. "A pair. One for each of us. I asked you about this two months ago, if you remember—matching bands, whether you'd actually wear one."
"I remember." Something in my chest went soft before I could stop it. "I thought you'd forgotten I said yes."
"I don't forget things anymore." His voice came out quieter than usual, and truer than usual too. "Not the things that matter."
I came around the counter and watched him lift the smaller ring free of the box, turning it slowly between his fingers.
When he looked up, I let him find my eyes and hold them, and the words came out of him the way they did every single morning now—not performed, not building toward anything, just true.
"I love you."
He said it every day. Had for months, long enough that it had stopped landing like a confession and started feeling like something closer to breathing.
Necessary. Unremarkable. The kind of true that didn't need an occasion to justify itself, which was, I'd slowly come to understand, exactly why I believed it now.
He reached for my right hand, the ring already angled toward my middle finger—the one I'd worn every ring on since before I met him
I moved my hand before I'd fully decided to.
Just slightly. I shifted my fingers, turned my palm, and guided the ring instead toward the one beside it.
My ring finger. Empty for three years, deliberately, pointedly empty, in a way I'd stopped letting myself think about too directly because thinking about it always cost me something I wasn't ready to spend yet.
He went completely still, the ring suspended in the air between us.
"Mandy."
"I'm done evaluating you, Damon." I kept my voice soft, but there wasn't a shred of hesitation in it, not one. "Two years is enough. I know exactly who you are now. I don't need to watch you a while longer to be sure of that."
I watched something come apart in his face, clean and total, and then he was down on one knee on my kitchen floor before either of us had consciously decided that was happening—his sleeve, my old shirt on my body, brushing my hip, morning light pooling gold across the tile between us,
the ring finally sliding home onto the exact finger it should have found three years earlier, if either of us had known then what we know now.
He looked up at me from the floor of the kitchen where, if I was being honest with myself, some small, stubborn part of me had already forgiven him a long time before today.
"Marry me again." His voice came out rough, thick with everything he clearly didn't have fast enough words for. "Properly, this time. Let me actually earn all of it—start to finish. Not just the parts where I already thought I knew better."
I looked down at him for a long moment. The ring caught the light between us.
Somewhere behind my ribs, six years of history—the girl outside his door in gardenia perfume, the wife who signed her own divorce papers at midnight, the woman who'd learned to want nothing from him and meant it—all of it settled, finally,
into something that felt less like a decision and more like the answer I'd already been circling for months.
"Yes." No hesitation at all. "Yes, Damon."