Page 129 of Cut Off
“Jonah, people, everywhere—”
“I know.” His voice cracks once and resets. “I was—“ He searches for it. “Scared of letting anyone in. Scared of losing everything again. I handled it like a coward. I’m not proud of that.”
“You don’t have to explain everything. I know.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You should hear it straight. I pushed you away because I couldn’t be the one taking away your dream. You deserve the world, Zoe. But now that your dream’s here, I’d love to be the one sharing it with you. Working every day to be the man good enough for you. Enjoying all of life’s detours, because you were a detour, and you were right—theyarethe best part.”
Eli detaches from my middle and looks up.
“Dad—”
Jonah glances down. “Yeah, bud?”
Eli steps back up to me, serious. “I miss you living with us because you could play chess with me all the time. And I miss that, even though you aren’t very good.”
A laugh breaks out of me. Somebody in the crowd—I want to say Jane—lets out a cackle.
“And when you live with us, we make mac and cheese together more,” Eli says, “and we always had fun. Can we go back to that? Because that was just how I liked it.”
Now I’m crying in a parking lot on local television. I don’t care.
“Me too, Eli. It was just the way I liked it, too.”
Jonah steps closer. His voice drops. “I’m still afraid,” he says. “But I’ll work through it. Because not doing that means losing you. You—” He swallows. “You’ve become the person I want to build my life around. You make our house feel like a home. You make me laugh. You inspire me. You make me a better man.”
He drops to one knee.
The parking lot loses it. Jane is weeping. Maddie’s filming with one hand and crying with the other. My mother is, I’m almost certain, on the ground.
Jonah opens a ring box.
The ring is my ring. The ring is, somehow, exactly my ring—a thin band, no catch on it, because he knows I work with my hands and my hair and my coffee cup all day, but dressed up, real, a line of small bright diamonds set flat into the platinum. He put thought into it. He thought about me, specifically, in jewelry stores, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“Because of you,” he says, “I’ve become good at showing up. And I plan to keep showing up.” He breathes once. “I love you. So much. Will you—will you marry me?”
Eli, beside him, both hands clasped under his chin. “Say yes, Zoe. Say yes so we can go back to exactly how it was. Please.”
My hands shake, and I press them against my stomach. The lights catch the wet ends of Jonah’s hair. Eli is looking at me like his future, his dreams, everything he’s ever imagined for his life is balanced on what I do next.
“Jonah,” I say. My voice cracks. “Eli. I—”
I can’t get the next sentence out around the size of my own chest.
“I love you both,” I manage through a croak. “And yes, I’ll marry you, Jonah. One hundred percent yes.”
The parking lot detonates.
Jonah’s on his feet in one motion. He pulls me in—Eli’s between us, both arms locked around my waist, Jonah’s arm coming down over the top of him, the three of us a single unit in the middle of a circle of people who are screaming. The ring is in Jonah’s left hand, not on my finger yet, because he’s too busy holding us both.
Eli, muffled against my hip: “Can we go home now?”
I laugh. I sob. I laugh again. I press my face into the top of his head and then into the side of Jonah’s neck and then back down to his head, like I’m collectingthem.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, Blastman. Let’s go home.”
Somewhere behind me, the cartoon beaver approves. The mayor shakes hands with my father. Jane hands out coffee. Jerry has, at some point, removed his tie and is waving it in the air. Maddie is sprinting toward us with both arms open. My brother’s distracted, flirting with W2Beaver’s new weather girl.
I lift my chin. I let the lights find me. I let the cameras have it.
