Page 84 of Based on You

Sloane kept filming, crying behind the camera.

Olivia ran across the bookstore at full speed, hit us with both arms, and held on for dear life. The three of us stood tangled together in the middle of the room, bathed in the candlelight, her arms wrapped around both of us and her face buried in the space between our shoulders.

I held on just as tight.

The ring was on my finger. The hardcover rested on the table with my real name gleaming on the spine. Sloane stood in the corner making a strangled sound that might have been laughing, might have been crying, and was probably both. She was shaking too hard to hold the phone steady, and the footage was going to be unwatchable, and I didn't care at all.

Four months ago, I'd stood broken in a sterile hotel room in Midtown and flatly told the man I loved that I never wanted to see him again.

I'd been wrong about that. I'd known I was wrong two days after I said it, and I'd said yes in a boardroom on the forty-seventh floor, and I was saying yes again now in a quiet bookstore in the West Village, wearing his ring, with Olivia still holding on to us.

He stayed.

He'd always been going to stay. I think I'd known that too, from somewhere buried under all the fear, in the quiet part of me that had spent two years writing him down, understanding his heart long before I was brave enough to say so out loud.

I signed my real name.

He stayed.

That was the whole story.

The story continues in Waiting for You.