35. Karissa
Chapter thirty-five
Karissa
Noah finds me at the edge of the ballroom before I find him, like he's not sure he's allowed this close.
"You weren't supposed to see that," he says.
"I know. Diane is going to eat that alive by Monday."
"Let her. There's nothing left to spin. I stood up there and agreed with every word she'd have used against me." He says it without heat, like he already priced it in and decided it doesn't matter. "I meant it for one person. She heard it. That's the part I care about."
Up close I can see it now. The thing under the polish, the thing that was never about polish. He looks like a man who hasn't slept in weeks and stopped pretending otherwise.
"You bought Reggie Voss's debt without telling me," I say. Not a question. A fact I still need to say out loud, one more time, before I let it go.
"Yes."
"You had my supplier's number in your phone and my mother's financial history in a file, and you never once asked yourself if that was mine to know first."
"No," he says. "I didn't. I'm not going to tell you it won't happen again, because that's the kind of thing I'd say to close a deal, and I promised myself I'd stop doing that with you."
He exhales. "I don't know yet how to want you and not try to run your life. I know that's true. What I know now, that I didn't know four weeks ago, is that not knowing isn't a reason to keep doing it. It's a reason to stop and ask."
Behind him, I can see Eleanor watching from her table, not moving, not intervening. Just watching, the way she watches everything. Like she already knows how this ends and is letting us get there on our own.
"Four weeks," I say. "You didn't call. Not once. Four weeks, and the only thing you sent me was three words at 11:00 p.m."
"I wanted to. Every day." His jaw tightens.
"I sat outside Theo's game in a parking lot for two hours because I didn't want to make it about me showing up.
I called my mother instead of you nine times because you didn't ask me to call, and for once in my life I decided that mattered more than what I wanted. "
"I know. That's why I'm here." I hadn't planned to say it. It comes out anyway. "I told Marcus I wasn't coming tonight. I told Theo. I meant it, right up until I didn't."
He said his out loud in front of four hundred people. The least I can do is say mine to his face.
"For four weeks I waited for you to do the thing you always do.
Show up at the bakery with a contractor and a check and a plan I never asked for.
Buy the problem out from under me so I'd have to be grateful instead of angry.
" I shake my head. "You didn't. Not once.
You let me be furious at you from across a whole city and you didn't manage a single second of it.
That's what I couldn't stop looking at. Not the speech tonight. The four weeks of nothing before it."
"The contract ends tonight," I say. "This gala. That was always the date. I did the math the way I do all of it, twice. Every event I signed for, I showed up to, including the ones after I stopped being able to look at you. I don't leave a ledger open."
"I know," he says.
"So we're square. Except what you spent on Voss.
I wired that back the morning I found out.
" I make myself hold his eyes. "And you took it.
You didn't argue. You didn't tell me it was already handled and couldn't be undone.
You didn't turn it into a gift I'd have to be gracious about. You just let me close my own account."
"It was yours to close," he says.
"That's the new part. You letting something be mine."
I think about the photo. The oven, door open, empty racks glowing orange.
I never told him what it meant. I'm not sure I fully knew myself, until right now.
"I sent you a photo of an empty oven," I say. "No words. I don't even know what I was asking."
"I know exactly what you were asking," he says. "You were asking if I was still there. I didn't answer because I was scared the honest answer was too much, and I'd already done enough with too much."
Something in my chest, held tight all that time, comes loose.
"I love you," I say, before I can decide whether it's the right moment, because I'm done deciding things around him instead of just saying them. "That's the part I've been avoiding since the elevator. It isn't the contract. It was never the contract."
"I love you, and I hate how much that scares me, and I came here tonight even though I told two people I wouldn't, because some part of me needed to see your face when I said it, whether or not you ever found the words yourself."
He goes still, the way he does when a number on a screen changes everything and he needs one second to let it land before he moves.
"Say it again," he says. Quiet. Not strategic. Just a man who wants to hear it twice.
"I love you."
He closes the distance and kisses me like the room isn't there, like Diane isn't a few tables away memorizing every second of it, like the silence didn't happen.
Except it did, and that's exactly why this one feels different.
Slower. Steadier. Like something built to hold weight instead of something built to survive a camera.
When he pulls back he's not smiling exactly. He looks like a man setting something down after carrying it a long time.
"I'm not going to do this the way I do everything else," he says.
"No lawyers. No terms. No two-week exit clause.
" He reaches into his jacket and comes out with something small, plain, nothing like what I'd have expected from a man who buys buildings before lunch.
"I'm asking. Not telling. Not managing. Asking, and I need you to know I will survive hearing no. "
"Noah—"
"Marry me," he says. "Not because it solves an image problem. Not because it's twelve public events. Because you're the only room I've ever wanted to be in that I didn't try to own first."
He exhales, and for once the calculation is gone completely from his face. "I love you. I've known it since a car ride home from a cemetery and I've been too much of a coward to say it until a stage forced my hand. I'm saying it now. Marry me."
The ring is small and simple and exactly nothing like the world he lives in, and I understand, looking at it, that he chose it that way on purpose.
He's proposing to a woman he's already, on paper, engaged to. It should feel absurd. It doesn't.
Every part of this arrangement started as something built for an audience. The ring is the first thing that was never staged at all.
This was the night it was all built to end. It doesn't.
I don't answer right away. Not because I'm unsure. Because I want him to sit in it one more second. The not-knowing, the waiting, the thing he's spent his whole life trying to control his way out of.
"Yes," I say.
The sound that comes out of him isn't a laugh, not quite. It's something with more relief in it than that.
He slides the ring on with hands that aren't steady, which is the most honest thing I've ever watched him do.
Somewhere behind us I hear Eleanor say something to Gerald Holt that sounds a great deal like finally, and across the room Diane has already turned away, and none of it matters, even a little.
"Theo's going to want a very specific kind of cake for this," I say against his jaw, because if I don't say something ordinary I'm going to cry in front of four hundred donors.
"I already asked him what kind," Noah says. "A while back. In case."
"You planned this a while back."
"I've been planning this since the elevator," he says. "I just didn't know how to ask for something I couldn't secure in advance."
I pull back far enough to look at him. Really look. No walls left standing that I can find.
"Ask me again sometime," I say. "When there isn't a room full of people watching."
"Every day," he says. "For the rest of my life, if you'll let me."
I kiss him instead of answering because some things don't need saying twice.