Chapter Twenty-Three What He’d Been Carrying
Mikani was six weeks old, finally sleeping in longer stretches, when Amir asked Pop to watch her for an evening so he could take Mika to dinner — nothing fancy, he said, just the two of them, just a night to remember they were people and not only parents.
He took her to the diner on Broad Street, the same red vinyl booth from that first night after his fight, a couple of years earlier now, and Mika laughed when she recognized it.
“You remember this place.”
“I remember everything about that night,” he said.
“Best night of my life, up ’til a few other nights that beat it recently.
” He reached across the table and took her hand, and something in his face had gone quiet, careful, deliberate in a way that made her heart start to pound before she understood why.
“I been carrying something around a while,” he said. “Since before Mikani, if I’m honest. Just been waiting for the right time, and then it felt like every time was too small for what I wanted to say, and I figured — why not here. Where it started.”
He got down on one knee right there between the booths, in front of the same waitress who’d served them pancakes at one in the morning a couple of years before, who gasped and dropped an entire tray of dishes and didn’t even seem to mind.
“Mika Bryant,” Amir said, ring box open, hands steadier than she’d ever seen them, steadier than championship rounds, steadier than anything.
“You walked into my life behind a desk, quiet as anything, and you didn’t want nothing from me — not my name, not my money, not what I could do for you.
You just saw me. Whole self, corner and all.
And you loved me anyway, and you built a whole life with me, and you gave me a daughter who’s got your same quiet strength already, I can see it in her.
I don’t want to spend one more day not making it official. Marry me.”
The whole diner had gone silent, every fork stopped mid-air, every eye on the two of them, and Mika — quiet, shy, careful Mika, who had spent a lifetime trying to take up as little space as possible — said yes loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, and didn’t apologize for it once.
Somebody in the diner filmed it, the way somebody always seemed to be filming Amir these days, and by morning the clip had gone almost as viral as the one that had once nearly broken them — except this time the caption underneath every repost read some version of the same warm thing: he really said ‘you didn’t want nothing from me’ and meant it.
Mika read the comments once, out of curiosity, and found, instead of cruelty, a wall of strangers rooting for a love story they’d only seen eleven seconds off.
Mika had a huge sigh of relief as the internet that had once tried to diminish her and her relationship didn’t get the final word on her story after all. She did.
They drove home that night with the ring catching streetlight through the windshield, Mikani asleep in her car seat, Amir humming something off-key and happy under his breath, and Mika thought, watching the city blur past the window, that she had never once in her whole careful life imagined a night could hold this much room in it for her.