28. Fran
— ? —
Fran
He wakes me before dawn.
“Get dressed,” he whispers, and there is something in his voice, nervous and excited and trying very hard to sound casual, that makes me sit up despite thirty-eight weeks of pregnancy protesting the entire concept of sitting.
“It’s still dark.” I squint at him from the warm cave of the blankets.
“I know.” He’s already dressed, I realize, and vibrating with something he’s trying to keep off his face.
“It’s January,” I try.
“I know that too.” He tugs the blanket off my feet, undeterred.
“Logan, I am enormous. I can barely put on socks without a strategy meeting. Where could you possibly want to take me that requires being awake at-” I squint at the clock. “5:47 in the morning?”
“Trust me.” He’s already pulling warm clothes from the dresser, my favorite sweater, the stretchy leggings that still fit if I am optimistic, thick socks. “Please.”
I grumble. I get dressed. The look on his face is doing a thing to my heart that makes no a very expensive word.
The farm is quiet in the pre-dawn dark, fields silvered with frost, the sky only just considering light at the edges.
Logan guides me toward the greenhouse, the big one at the far end of the property, where I have been forcing bulbs and starting seedlings like a woman who believes in spring even when the ground is frozen.
“We’re going to the greenhouse?” My breath ghosts white in the cold.
“We’re going near the greenhouse,” he corrects, steering me by the shoulders.
“That’s very specific,” I say.
“I’m a very specific person.” I can hear the grin in it even in the dark.
He opens the door and ushers me inside, and I stop breathing.
The greenhouse has been transformed. String lights are draped along the metal framework, casting a warm gold over everything.
Space heaters hum in the corners, making the air pleasantly warm despite the January cold pressed against the glass.
And in the center, surrounded by the early blooms I have been coaxing from bulbs all winter, paperwhites and amaryllis and the first brave tulips, is a small table set with breakfast. Pastries from the bakery in town.
My favorite tea. A vase filled with flowers I recognize as my own.
“Logan,” I breathe.
“I had help from Junie,” he admits. “With the logistics. But the flowers are all yours. Everything in here - you grew it.”
I walk deeper in, touching the petals of a paperwhite, breathing the sweet narcissus scent. These are my flowers. My work. Months of careful cultivation displayed like they are something precious, which they are, which he knows.
“This is beautiful,” I say.
“You’re beautiful.” He’s not even looking at the flowers.
“I am thirty-eight weeks pregnant and I have not brushed my hair,” I remind him.
“Stunning. Radiant. A vision.” He ticks each one off like he’s reading a verdict.
“You’re full of it.” My face goes hot anyway.
“I’m full of love for my wife.” He moves to stand beside me, his hand finding mine. “Sit down. Please.”
I sit, because my feet are already aching and the chair looks like a religious experience. Logan sits across from me, and for a moment we just look at each other across the table, surrounded by flowers and warmth and the first light of dawn filtering through the glass.
“I have something for you,” he says.
“I figured.”
“You’re ruining my moment.”
“Sorry. Continue.”
He reaches under the table and brings out a box.
It is wood, I can tell that immediately, but it is like nothing I have ever seen.
The lid is inlaid with flowers, each one cut from a different wood, the grain doing the work of color.
Dahlias and ranunculus and zinnias. The varieties I grow in my fields, reproduced with an artistry that takes my breath and does not give it back.
“You made this.”
“I’ve been working on it for weeks.” He sets it on the table between us. “Every flower is a different wood. The dahlia is purpleheart - it’ll darken over time, the way real dahlias deepen as they age. The ranunculus is figured maple, for the way the petals catch the light. The zinnia-”
“Logan.” I put my hand on his to stop him. “It’s perfect. I’ve never owned anything this beautiful.”
“Open it.”
I lift the lid carefully, reverently, and inside, nestled on velvet the exact shade of the flannel I wore the day we met in my father’s office, is my wedding ring.
My wedding ring. The one I left on my pillow the morning I fled the hospital. The one I thought I would never see again.
“You kept it,” I whisper.
“I’ve been carrying it since the day you left.
” His voice is rough, half an open wound, stripped of any performance, shaking anyway.
“Found a cord. Put it around my neck. I couldn’t let it go.
Even when I thought I’d never find you. Even when I thought you might never want to see me again - I couldn’t stop carrying it. ”
I pick up the ring. Familiar weight. Clean, polished, sparkling in a way it has not since I first put it on in that courthouse two years ago.
“Logan-”
“Wait. Let me say this.” He takes a breath. “Two years ago I let our fathers do the asking. I let you believe that’s all you were to me - a means to an end, a box to check on my way to money I wanted then and have since renounced. And then I let you live alone inside a marriage for two years.”
“You gave up the inheritance.”
“Months ago. Before I even found you again.” He meets my eyes. “I don’t want the money. I don’t want anything that came with strings attached. I just want you. I have since you sat on the kitchen counter in the dark and let me go on about a dining table like it was interesting.”
Tears are streaming down my face. Damn pregnancy hormones. Damn him for being this true about it.
“The first time,” he continues, “our fathers chose. They looked at us and saw assets to be combined, families to be allied. They didn’t care if we loved each other. They didn’t care if we’d be happy.”
“They didn’t.”
“But this time-” He reaches across the table and takes both my hands. “This time I’m asking. No clause, no contract, nobody’s expectations but ours. Marry me again. Because we choose it this time.”
“We’re already married.”
“I know. And I want to choose it again, out loud, in front of the people who actually matter to us. Everything I told you on the porch swing, I want witnesses for.”
He stands, moving around the table to kneel beside my chair. His hands are shaking slightly. There is a vulnerability in his expression that makes my chest ache.
“Fran Salazar Davis,” he says, and his voice is steady despite the trembling. “Will you renew your vows with me? Will you choose me, the way I’m choosing you?”
I look at him, the man who carried my ring on a cord around his neck and made a jewelry box with flowers because he knows how much they mean to me.
This man who went back into a fire. Who spent months learning how to be better.
Who is on his knees in a greenhouse at dawn with sawdust probably still in some metaphorical part of him I will never fully sand out.
“Yes,” I say. “Obviously yes.”
His whole face transforms, relief and joy and something that looks like wonder. “Yeah?”
“Did you actually think I was going to say no? After all of this?” I gesture at the greenhouse, the flowers, the box. “You woke me up before dawn and made me walk through frost while thirty-eight weeks pregnant. I was absolutely going to say yes just to make that worth it.”
He laughs, a little breathlessly. “Can I put the ring back on?”
“Please.”
He takes my hand. Works the ring I left behind back onto my finger, where it belongs. The deal finally turned into a choice. We both look at it for a while. Everything we have been through and everything we are choosing to become, and it still fits.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you too.” I pull him up from his knees, ridiculous position anyway, especially with my belly in the way, and into a kiss.
The kiss starts gentle.
It does not stay that way.
There is something about the moment, the ring on my finger, the flowers all around us, the warm gold light, the open sky through glass. That makes me want more. Makes me want to celebrate this in the most fundamental way possible. Just us, the blooms, no crowd.
“Wait,” Logan murmurs against my mouth. “The ground is cold. And you’re-”
“There’s a blanket in the supply closet.” I nip at his lower lip. “I put it there last week. For naps.”
“You take naps in the greenhouse?”
“I take naps wherever I can find warmth and privacy.” I am already pulling him toward the back, where the supply area has been set up with old furniture from the farmhouse, past paperwhites that smell like a wedding I have not had yet. “Come on.”
The supply corner is small but not nothing, a worn couch I have been meaning to throw away, stacked bags of potting soil under a tarp, and yes, the blanket. Logan takes one look at it and starts to say something practical about my back and the couch being too short.
I silence him with another kiss.
“Stop thinking,” I say. “Just be here. With me.”
“I’m always here with you.”
“Then prove it.”
He does. His mouth on mine, then my jaw, then the place under my ear that makes my breath catch.
My sweater goes over my head, lands on a bag of potting soil.
His shirt follows. My bra lands somewhere near the potting soil.
His hands settle on my waist, warm and steady, thumbs tracing slow circles on my skin.
“Hi,” he says, quiet.
“Hi yourself.”
Then we’re skin to skin in the half-light, and this is what choosing it looks like.
“You sure?” he asks, because he still asks, because after everything the asking is the whole point.
“You put a ring back on my finger twenty minutes ago,” I say, getting a hand in his hair. “You don’t get to look nervous now. Couch. Sit. I’m not doing this on a frozen floor like a Victorian tragedy.”
“Bossy,” he says, delighted, already reaching for the couch.
“You married bossy. Sit.”