Page 81 of The Beast
"I want to read something," I said to Brock.
He put his pint down and gave me his attention the way he always gave it—completely, without fraction.
I read:
For Daniel Whitaker, who wrote this name down three times so he wouldn't lose it. Who drove carefully, with both hands on the wheel. Who carried both bags. Who said I hope she's happy before he knew the ending. Who covered a woman with his body without one moment's hesitation, not one mark of fear on his face. He was the best of what a person could be inthe worst possible moment, and this place was his idea. We are here because of him, and we are grateful. We will not forget.
The fire crackled. The pub held us.
Brock reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
We sat with it for a long time. We didn't say anything else, because there was nothing else required. I had said what needed saying in the only place Daniel had ever intended to come, and I had said it out loud, which was the only way I knew to make something real.
When the pints were finished, I went up to the bar and spoke to the man behind it. I asked if I could leave something—a small framed card, the words I'd written, to be hung somewhere. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked at me.
"Friend of yours?" he said.
"Yes," I said. "He was."
He nodded once and put it behind the bar, and I understood it would find its place.
We walked out into the Killarney air. The mountains in the distance were doing something extraordinary with the light.
Brock stopped walking.
I walked another two steps before I realized and turned back.
He was standing in the middle of the lane with a look on his face I had never seen him wear. Something more open than any of those. Something that had come down all the way.
He had a ring in his hand.
It was not a traditional ring. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—gold and unusual, an asymmetrical setting that held the stone at an angle, the stone itself a pale warm champagne color that shifted as he turned it, catching the Killarney light.
"I found a jeweler,” he said. "Told her you were an artist." He paused. "She said it should catch the light differently everytime you look at it. Said a painter would want something that changed. Something that wasn't the same thing twice."
I put both hands over my mouth.
"Marry me," he said. Not a speech. Just the plain fact of it, delivered in the flat, direct way he delivered everything that mattered. "I know what I am and I know what I come with—the history, the family, all of it. And I know what you are, and I know what you're building, and I want to be there for it. All of it." A beat. "Marry me."
I was crying. I hadn't cried this whole trip, had held it carefully together through the pub and the card and the fire, and I was crying now in a Killarney lane in the evening light with the mountains behind him and this man's whole enormous heart right there in his hands.
"Yes," I said. "Obviously, yes."
He put the ring on my finger and it caught the light exactly the way she had promised.
I laughed—part joy, part the absurdity of it, part the relief of a moment that had been building since an alley in Charleston finally arriving and being exactly what it should be.
"You know," I said, "there are people who would call me a flight risk."
He looked at me. That jaw. Those eyes.
"You ran out of a church," he said. "In a dress that weighed seventeen pounds." The almost-smile. "I figure a woman who can do that can go anywhere she wants."
"I'm not running from you," I said.
"I know," he said. "You ran straight into me. That's different."
I looked at the ring on my finger, the light moving through it, changing.
