Page 46 of Never Alone
"In my apartment? That's the best you can come up with?"
"It's realistic. You're not a grand-gesture man, Cole. You're a guy who proposes in his living room. Probably with a beer in his hand."
Damn it.
It wasn't a bad story. She wasn't wrong about the grand gesture, either.
"Is this what they teach you at Wake Forest?"
She picked her coffee back up.
"They teach you to read carefully and write convincingly. The rest is storytelling with a verdict at the end. English Lit was the warm-up."
Sam laughed.
Jamie was already mouthing something to Rosie I couldn't see.
We stayed at the table a while longer. Eventually, I shrugged into my jacket and headed for the truck.
I took the long way home and knew why halfway through.
The picture wouldn't leave my head—my living room, Tessa standing by the window, me with a ring in my hand. I'd never pictured myself proposing to anyone before, and now I couldn't stop. I turned up the radio, but it didn't help.
By the time I parked, I'd stopped trying to push the picture out.
I have to propose to her.
CHAPTER 9
Tessa
Cole had brought up 2007.
In a paid-by-the-hour office, in front of a stranger, without warning me, without giving me a moment to step into a conversation he was starting on my behalf—he had said it, and Miranda had nodded, and the eighteen years I had been carrying alone had ended in a beat I had not been ready for.
We hadn't talked about it. Not once. In all the time between him saying yes at the firehouse and us walking into Miranda's office together, he had not brought up Ryan's name or the year my father had moved us out of state. I had been waiting for him to. Since the day I'd asked him. For years before that, in cities where I'd thought I might run into him by accident and drafted what I'd say.
I'd had the words since I was nineteen and twenty and twenty-three and thirty-one.I'm sorry. You were right. You were the only person who told me the truth.I had imagined the room we would be in when I said it. I had imagined his face. I had imagined the version of me who, one day, would finally be brave enough to do it.
He hadn't given me the room. He hadn't given me any version of me. He had walked into Miranda's office and put 2007down on her desk himself, because that was apparently what he believed was the right thing.
I had sat there in the chair next to him while he did it, and I had not said one word that was worth the weight of what he was doing.
For eighteen years, I had carried a version of Cole in my head that justified what I'd said in a parking lot when I was sixteen. The grudge had done a job. As long as he had been the boy who'd had no right, I had not had to be the girl who'd been cruel.
He was killing that version. Every day. Every quiet thing he did. He was making it impossible for me to keep him as the boy I had needed him to be—and what was coming in under the grudge was eighteen years of guilt I had not yet earned the right to put down.
I didn't know what I could give him back for that. I wasn't sure there was anything.
I parked in front of the building. Noah unbuckled himself and slid out without being asked, his backpack over one shoulder, the paper sack of leftover focaccia from Mrs. Thompson tucked carefully under his arm.
I unlocked the front door and let us in. The mailboxes were in the entryway, the long bank of them along the wall by the stairs. Noah leaned against the banister and waited.
I turned the small key in 2A and felt the door of the box give.
There was an envelope inside, red and stiff, the kind people sent Christmas cards in. It was addressed to Noah in handwriting I didn't have to read twice.
I kept my body between him and the box. I pulled the rest of the mail out, slid the red envelope under the stack, and only then did I turn it over against my thumb.
