Chapter Twenty-One — Real Trust
He proposed on a Tuesday. Neither of them ever discussed it, but it could not, apparently, have been any other day of the week.
Not at a rooftop restaurant, not with a ring hidden in a dessert, not with a single photograph destined for a billboard anywhere in the city of Atlanta.
He did it at the diner off Cascade with the eggs that hadn't changed in decades, across the same booth, over milkshakes, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon eighteen months after he'd walked back into her life with no gold foil on his business card.
"I don't have a speech," he told her, which was, in itself, the most romantic thing he could have said, because the old Zaire — the diner-and-rooftop Zaire, the Zaire who'd calculated every word before he let it out into a room — would absolutely have had a speech, rehearsed and careful and just this side of too polished to be trusted.
"I just know I don't want to spend another Tuesday of my life not knowing you're mine," he said instead. "Not the heir. Not the company. Just me. If you'll have just me."
She said yes with a milkshake straw still in her hand, and the whole diner — half of them regulars who'd watched this exact booth host this exact couple for a year and a half without ever fully understanding what they were watching — broke into applause loud enough to embarrass them both.
They got married in her mother's backyard the following spring, forty guests, no billboard, no press release, no merger of anything except two people who had, by then, spent two full years learning each other back down to the studs and rebuilding on something that could actually hold weight.
Ruby cried, openly, which nobody had ever seen her do.
Ty stood as best man again — the real thing, this time, no sash required — and gave a toast that made Kamiko laugh so hard she had to sit down, and at the end of it he looked at her, serious for once in his life, and said, "I'm sorry it took me this long to be somebody you could trust," and she'd hugged him, finally, the whole thing closed.
Neveah caught the bouquet and pretended she hadn't been aiming for it the whole time.
Elijah Kingston came. He didn't say much, and what he did say to Kamiko — a stiff, formal welcome to the family delivered like a man reading from cue cards — wasn't warm, exactly, but it was there, which was more than either of them had expected two years earlier, standing in that study while he called her something small and dismissive to keep from having to say her name.