Epilogue
Isit cross-legged on the floor in Josh’s living room, barefoot, with my sweater sleeves pulled over my hands and one of Iris’s board books open in my lap.
Josh’s cousin dropped Iris off twenty minutes ago with two bags, a list of nap instructions, and the exhausted gratitude of a woman getting one full Saturday to herself.
Iris does not care about the book.
Iris cares about the edge of the coffee table, Josh’s left sock, and the coaster I have now moved three times.
“No chewing on the coaster, sweetie,” I tell her.
She looks straight at me and reaches for it again.
Josh glances over from the kitchen. “She heard you.”
“I know.”
“She just doesn’t agree with you.”
I move the coaster to the far side of the table.
Iris slaps one hand on the rug and gives me a look so betrayed I almost hand it back. “Oh, she’s good.”
Josh grins.
He is wearing gray sweatpants and an old Columbia sweatshirt with one cuff pushed up his forearm. His hair is still damp from the shower. There is a faint crease on his cheek from the pillow.
I love him so much I have to look back down at the book.
Iris pulls herself higher against the coffee table. One knee straightens. Then the other. She wobbles in place, round cheeks full of effort, her little pink pants bunched at one ankle.
“Josh,” I say, very quietly.
He turns at once.
Iris takes one hand off the table.
No one breathes.
She lifts one foot. Puts it down. Lifts the other. Her whole body tips forward, and for one wild second I think she is going to pitch face-first into the rug, but she rights herself with a small grunt and takes another step.
Josh comes out of the kitchen with his mug still in his hand.
“She’s doing it,” he says. “But her pants are losing the battle.”
Iris takes two more steps, lands on her bottom, and looks shocked by the floor. And laughs.
The sound fills the apartment, bright and pleased and entirely unaware of what she just did to both of us.
Josh crouches beside me. His shoulder brushes mine. “My cousin is going to be so mad we got first steps.”
Iris grabs the coffee table again and starts the whole process over.
“I think she was motivated by the coaster.” I laugh.
Josh watches Iris for a moment. His face goes soft in a way I used to think only belonged to emergency rooms and sleeping babies.
Now I see it everywhere. Over groceries, my shoes by his door, his hand on the small of my back when we cross a street, the extra key he gave me without ceremony.
Small things.
The life.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
Before I can ask where he is going, he stands and disappears down the hall.
“Iris,” I say, “your weekend host has abandoned us.”
She looks at me, blinks once, and sits down hard again.
“Good thing you have padding down there.”
Josh comes back carrying a stuffed giraffe.
It is new.
I smile before I can stop myself.
“You bought her another giraffe?”
“The first one lives with Iris now.”
“So naturally she needed a Manhattan giraffe.”
“Obviously.”
He crouches a few feet from Iris and holds the toy out. “Iris. Can you bring this to Liv?”
Iris stares at the giraffe.
Then she stares at me.
She takes the giraffe from Josh with both hands and immediately tries to put one ear in her mouth.
“Strong start,” I say.
Josh’s eyes flick to mine. “Give her a second.”
There is something in his voice.
My fingers still on the edge of the board book.
Iris pushes herself up with the giraffe trapped against her chest. She takes one step. Then another. The giraffe’s long neck bobs under her chin. Halfway across the rug, she sits down like a tiny commuter taking an unscheduled break.
“Oh, we all support rest periods,” I tell her.
Josh does not laugh.
My pulse notices.
Iris stands again. She makes the last three steps with her mouth open, pleased with herself, and falls against my knee.
I make my face very serious. Very impressed. The big-deal face.
“Oh my goodness,” I say. “What do you have?”
Iris shoves the giraffe into my hands.
I take the toy, ready to clap, ready to make the kind of ridiculous praise sounds I once believed I was too dignified to make.
My thumb catches on ribbon.
I turn the giraffe over.
A small box is tied tight against the giraffe’s stomach with a narrow blue ribbon.
My hands stop.
For one second, there is only Iris’s warm little weight against my leg and Josh moving toward me across the rug.
He crouches in front of me and takes the giraffe from my hands and unties the ribbon.
Iris reaches for the giraffe at once.
“Terrible timing, Tomato,” he says, soft.
A laugh catches in my throat.
Josh sets the giraffe beside her, keeps the box, and lowers one knee to the rug.
Everything in me goes quiet.
He opens the box.
The ring is simple. Clean. A bright center stone with a thin band, simple enough for court, elegant enough for galas, perfect enough to make my eyes burn.
Josh looks up at me.
“I had a whole plan for this,” he says. “A restaurant. A view. You in the green dress.”
My hand is at my mouth now.
He smiles a little, and his hand is steady around the box. Surgeon’s hands.
“But this is the version I actually want,” he says. “My apartment. Saturday morning. A baby on the floor. Coffee getting cold.”
I laugh once, because I cannot help it.
His smile warms.
“The small version,” he says.
My eyes fill.
Only it does not feel small.
It is the room where I learned the sound of his coffee maker.
The rug where Iris dropped one sock every chance she got.
The couch where I fell asleep waiting for him to come home.
He holds the box a little closer.
“Please say you will marry me.”
I nod.
“Yes.”
Josh exhales, and the sound is so human, so relieved, so him, I reach for his face before he can move. He laughs against my palm.
“I should put the ring on you first,” he says.
“You should.”
“Very demanding for a woman who just accepted my giraffe proposal.”
He takes my left hand. His thumb moves once over my knuckle, and the ring slides into place.
Josh looks at my hand for half a second, like he needs to see the ring there before he trusts the room.
I pull him toward me.
The kiss is warm and sweet at first.
Then we start to laugh because Iris has one hand on Josh’s sleeve and the other on the giraffe. And because Iris, as it turns out, has terrible respect for dramatic timing, she smacks him with the giraffe’s head.
Josh laughs against my mouth.
I hand the giraffe back to Iris. She clutches it by the neck, sits down between us, and begins a long, serious inspection of one ear.
Josh looks at Iris with the giraffe.
His shoulder rests against mine. My ring catches the morning light from his window.
He says, “Five more minutes. Then we put Iris in the stroller and take her for a walk.”
I lean into him, barefoot on his living room floor, coffee cold, baby happy, ring warm on my hand.
“Five more minutes.”
THE END
If you enjoyed this sweet romance you might enjoy reading Nadia and Jonah's story. Jonah is as swoony as Josh, just in a Jonah-specific way! Stuck with my Secret Crush: A brother's Best Friend Sweet Romance
"I am just saying," Liv’s voice crackles through my AirPods, "if you wear another black turtleneck to Sam's gallery tonight, I am going to spill red wine on it ‘accidentally.’ You are a beautiful, single woman in Manhattan, Nadia. Show some collarbone."
I let out a quiet laugh, before stepping out of the elevator and onto the forty-fourth floor. "My black turtlenecks are efficient, Liv. And tonight isn't about me catching the eye of some pretentious art critic. It's about supporting Sam."
"You can support Sam and still look hot," Priya chimes in on the three-way call. "We'll see you at seven. Do not be late."
"I'm walking into the final Q3 renewal debrief right now," I say, stopping outside the heavy glass doors of the main conference room. "I will be there at seven. I promise."
I tap my AirPods to end the call, letting the warm, chaotic energy of my best friends fade into the sterile silence of the executive suite.
The smile drops. I straighten my spine, adjusting the strap of my leather briefcase. There’s my life with them. And then there’s this.
I push open the glass door. Eight senior executives turn to look at me.
At the far end of the table, Jason—barely a year out of MIT and wearing a deeply arrogant smirk—twirls a silver pen between his fingers.
He has spent the last three weeks trying to poke holes in my cybersecurity architecture just to prove he can.
No one in this room is going to see me sweat.
I walk to the front of the room, my face a mask of careful, empty professionalism. "Let's look at this from a different angle."
"The system kept them out.” I say, hitting the clicker. “The real danger is thinking that when bad guys find a locked door, they just give up and walk away. They don't. They look for a window."
The halogen lights of the forty-fourth-floor conference room glare off the screen.
"This morning, the attackers stopped trying to break the front door. Instead, they sent a fake email to an employee and waited for someone to click the link."
"Right, but they still got in."
The voice comes from the far end of the table.
I don't look at him right away. I let a two-second beat of silence pass, establishing exactly who controls this debrief. Then I shift my gaze to Jason. He isn't looking at me. He is looking at Mark, my department head, who is seated to my right.
"They got in," Jason repeats, aiming his words entirely at Mark. "Which means the defensive architecture Nadia built is fundamentally too optimistic about how users handle email security. We can't rely on a system that assumes human beings won't click a bad link."
A quiet rustle of fabric echoes around the room. Three of the senior vice presidents shift in their seats. I watch, tracking their movement, as their collective gaze drifts away from me and settles onto Mark. They are waiting for the man in charge to validate the younger man's challenge.
My heart rate jumps, the familiar spike of adrenaline hitting my ribs.
Optimistic.
I'm not going to correct him. Not yet.