25. Fran
— ? —
Fran
The dahlias are perfect this year.
I stand at the edge of the cutting field, twenty-nine weeks pregnant and thoroughly muddy, watching the afternoon light catch the blooms in shades of coral and burgundy and the particular pink that I’ve been calling “sunset blush” even though Logan insists it’s just orange.
The Henderson wedding is in three days, and every stem I’ve grown for them is exactly right, lush and full and ready to become something beautiful.
This is what I built. This is what I’m good at.
“You’re doing that thing again,” Logan says from behind me.
I turn to find him walking up the row, two mugs of tea in his hands. He’s been working on the fence at the far end of the property all morning, and there’s sawdust in his hair and dirt on his jeans and he looks absolutely ridiculous and completely perfect.
“What thing?”
“The ‘I grew these with my own hands and I’m extremely proud’ thing.” He hands me a mug. “It’s very cute.”
“I’m not cute. I’m accomplished.”
“You’re both.” He surveys the field with an expression that might be admiration or might just be confusion. “They do look amazing. Even I can tell, and I still can’t distinguish coral from peach.”
“No one can distinguish coral from peach. It’s a scam perpetuated by the wedding industry.”
“Then why do you sell both?”
“Because brides pay extra for specificity.” I take a sip of tea. He’s made it perfectly, two sugars, splash of milk, strong enough to cut through pregnancy fatigue. “Thank you for this. And for the fence.”
“The fence needed work.”
“The fence has needed work for two years. You’re just looking for excuses to stay useful.”
He doesn’t deny it. Instead, he moves to stand beside me, looking out at the rows of flowers stretching toward the treeline. “Is that a bad thing? Wanting to be useful?”
“It’s not a bad thing.” I lean into his shoulder, feeling the solid warmth of him through his work shirt. “It’s just… different. From before.”
“Before, I didn’t know how to be useful in ways that mattered to you.” His voice is quiet. “I knew how to build things and run a business and show up at events. I didn’t know how to show up for my wife.”
“You’re learning.”
“I’m trying.” He turns to face me, and there’s something in his expression, hopeful and vulnerable and completely unguarded. “Is it working? The trying?”
I think about the past few months. The tea made exactly right every morning. The pregnancy book with its careful annotations. The public apology that named every way he’d failed me without making excuses. The way he’s been present, really present, in a way he never was before.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s working.”
His whole face changes. The hope crystallizes into something brighter, something that looks like joy.
“Good.” He clears his throat. “That’s… that’s really good.”
We stand there in comfortable silence, drinking our tea, watching the dahlias nod in the breeze. Gertrude is patrolling the far end of the field, occasionally honking at things only she can see. The sky is that perfect autumn blue that makes everything look like a painting.
“I love you,” I say.
The words come out before I can overthink them, before I can retreat behind careful qualifications and emotional safety nets. I just say it, out loud, in daylight, because it’s true and I’m tired of not saying true things.
Logan goes very still.
“What?”
“I love you.” I turn to face him fully. “I’ve been scared to say it because I kept waiting for something to go wrong.
Kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for you to turn back into the cold version of yourself, for all of this to fall apart.
” I take a breath. “But you haven’t. You’ve been showing up, day after day, and you’ve been patient, and you’ve been kind, and you’ve been-” I gesture vaguely. “You.”
“The good version of me.”
“The real version of you. The one you were too scared to let anyone see.” I set my mug on a fence post so I can take both his hands.
“I love you, Logan. Not because you saved me from a fire - I loved you before that, even when you were breaking my heart. Not because you apologized in public - that mattered, but it’s not why.
I love you because of who you are when no one’s watching.
Because of the way you talk about wood grain like it’s poetry.
Because you carry annotated pregnancy books and make my tea exactly right and let my goose bite you without complaint. ”
“She hasn’t bitten me in weeks.”
“She’s warming up to you. That’s my point.” I squeeze his hands. “You’ve earned this. Not with grand gestures or dramatic sacrifices, but with all the small, ordinary things that actually make a marriage work. And I wanted you to know that I see it. I see you.”
He’s looking at me like I’ve handed him something precious, something he doesn’t quite believe is real.
“Fran,” he says, and his voice is rough. “I’ve been in love with you since that night in the kitchen with the cereal box. Probably before that - probably since the courthouse, when you looked at me like I was a puzzle you were determined to solve.”
“You were a puzzle. You’re still a puzzle.”
“A puzzle you love.”
“A puzzle I love.” I smile. “Yes.”
He sets down his own tea and pulls me into his arms, carefully, mindful of the belly between us, and holds me like I’m something he’s afraid to lose.
“I love you too,” he says against my hair, out loud, in the daylight, and he means every word of it.
“I want forever. The rest of our lives, not some contract with an expiration date. I want you for good, always, and none of it because I have to, or because of deals or obligations or somebody’s family scorecard.
Just because you’re the person I want to wake up next to until I die, and possibly after, if the afterlife has decent tea. ”
I pull back enough to see his face. There’s sawdust in his hair and a streak of dirt on his jaw and he has never looked less like a man who once married me for an inheritance.
I grin.
“Then you’ll have to propose.”
He grins back, slow and helpless, like I’ve dropped the best problem of his life straight into his lap.
“I will.”
“When.”
“Soon. There will be flowers and probably a goose and possibly tears - mine, not yours. When I do it, you’ll know. I’m not doing it covered in fence dirt with Gertrude judging us from the third row.”
Gertrude honks, on cue, like she has opinions about being excluded from a hypothetical proposal.
“She’s already judging us,” I say. “That’s her resting face.”
“I can do better than a muddy field.”
“I don’t need better. I just need you.”
He cups my face in his hands, fence dirt and all.
“You have me,” he says. “You’ve always had me. I just didn’t know how to let you.”
I kiss him. Soft at first, then not. Tea and sawdust and the particular electricity of having finally said the true thing in the middle of the afternoon with no one to perform for except a goose.
When I pull back, I’m breathing like I’ve been running.
“The dahlias,” I say, not looking at the dahlias, “are not going to pick themselves. Also I am covered in dirt. Also if you keep looking at me like that I am going to do something that will scandalize the Hendersons’ centerpieces.”
“The Hendersons can wait.” His thumb traces my lower lip. “You said you love me. I’m allowed a minute.”
“You can have as many minutes as you want. Indoors. Where there is a bed and no livestock audience.”
He laughs, low, and it does a thing to my spine that has nothing to do with pregnancy and everything to do with the fact that there are no walls left between us.
Not the contract, not the fire, not the years of being cold in public.
Just this field, and this man, and the rest of our lives sitting in the air like a promise he hasn’t even gotten down on one knee for yet.
“Come on,” I say, taking his hand. “Before I start making declarations to the zinnias too.”
We walk back to the farmhouse hand in hand, leaving the dahlias to their afternoon sun.
The farmhouse is warm and welcoming, filled with the evidence of the life we’ve been building together, his jacket on the hook by the door, my gardening boots beside his work boots, the pregnancy books stacked on the coffee table next to his woodworking sketches.
It’s small and cramped and nothing like the homes either of us grew up in, and I love it completely.
“I should shower,” I say, gesturing at my muddy state. “I look like I lost a fight with a compost pile.”
“You look beautiful.”
“You have to say that. You’re in love with me.”
“I have to say it because it’s true.” He follows me toward the bathroom, and there’s something in his eyes that makes my breath catch. “Can I join you?”
The question hangs in the air between us. It’s not the first time he’s asked, we’ve been circling each other for weeks, building toward something, but it feels different now, weightier and more real, no taking it back.
“Yes,” I say. “You can join me.”
The bathroom is small, barely big enough for one person let alone two, which is a fact we discover immediately and then ignore with great commitment.
I get the water running. He gets my shirt over my head with the focused care of a man defusing something precious and muddy.
My bra is a feat of engineering at twenty-nine weeks and he treats the clasps like they might report him to a commission.
I laugh into his throat. He swears, fond, and then we’re both under the spray, and the farmhouse water heater is the one thing in this building that has never once been accused of generosity.
“It’s lukewarm,” I say.
“It’s character-building.”
“It’s a war crime.” I tip my head back anyway, because his hands are in my hair, rinsing out dirt and dahlia bits and the entire morning, and I would stand under glacier runoff if he kept doing that. “If we freeze to death, tell the Hendersons their bouquet is in the third row.”
“I’ll tell them nothing. I’ll be dead next to you. Very romantic. Very inconvenient for Gertrude.”