Page 211 of Just One More Thing

Dozens of them.

Hurricane glasses scattered through the sand and lining a glowing path through the clearing.

Then the rest comes into focus.

The same view that stole my breath the last time we were here.

The sky to the east is just beginning to wake up, pale pink peeking above the water across the horizon.

Then my gaze lands in the center of the clearing.

Where the blanket and pillows were last time, there are pilings now. A foundation outlined in candlelight.

I turn around slowly.

Jake is on one knee.

In the sand. In candlelight. Sunrise behind him. A look on his face that is the steadiest, most certain, most Jake thing I’ve ever seen.

In his hand is a ring.

I gasp.

“Jake,” I whisper, “is that…”

It looks like the ring he gave me the summer we were twelve and pretended to get married.

He spent his whole allowance feeding quarters into the gumball machine at Hart’s Landing, twisting the metal dial over and over until it finally spit out a plastic egg with a ring inside. It was shaped like a flower. Pink plastic center. Clear fake jewels around it catching the sunlight like they were the fanciest diamonds on earth.

I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

“Do you remember?” he asks. His voice is steady, but his hand is not.

The heat of that afternoon comes back all at once. Jake kicking the jammed machine twice until the egg finally dropped.

Granny making us a wedding cake out of stacked doughnuts with a chocolate glaze on top. His mom topping it with a shaker of salt for the bride and pepper for the groom from The Knuckle.

I wore that ring until it turned my finger green and the silver coating flaked off.

“I remember. I remember it all.”

“Let’s not pretend this time,” he says.

I am not crying.

I am absolutely crying.

He’s looking at me with so much hope on his face it almost hurts to see.

“I have loved you since before I knew what that word meant. I loved you then. I love you now. I’ll love you tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day until I run out of them.”

He holds up the ring.

“Emory Madeline Donovan. Marry me.”

The sun breaks over the horizon. Pink and gold spill across the water, across the sand, across his face.

This man.