Page 52 of Dread

I dropped my hand and headed through the yard toward the back porch of our house. What I needed to say to her wasn’t something I wanted to compete with motorcycles, children, and twenty conversations to be heard.

* * *

Katy sat on the back porch steps with her shoes beside her, bare feet resting on the step below. The cookout was winding down. Most of the kids had migrated toward the fire pit, where the last coals glowed beneath a layer of ash, while the adults lingered in loose groups across the yard. No one seemed ready to call the evening over yet.

Ellie had stretched out in the grass with Biscuit sprawled partly across her, his head on her stomach. Her hand rested in his fur, moving occasionally when she remembered to scratch behind his ears. After hours of running, she looked ready to fall asleep exactly where she was, and Biscuit seemed perfectly willing to join her.

I lowered myself onto the step beside Katy, close enough that our shoulders met. She glanced at me but didn’t shift away, and I settled beside her with my arm resting against hers. Months ago, either of us might have noticed the contact enough to think about it. Now it was simply where I sat when there was a place beside her.

The sounds of the barbecue carried across the compound in dampened packets. A bottle clinking against a table. Someone’s laugh, sharp and sudden, cutting through the general murmur. The low rumble of men’s voices from the clubhouse porch where the serious drinking had moved indoors now that the children had settled. Katy’s knee pressed against mine. Her bare foot rested beside my boot on the step below, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off her skin.

I pulled the velvet box from my pocket and rested it on my open palm between us. For a second, I watched Katy instead of opening it. Her attention dropped to the box, and I saw the exact moment she understood what it was.

I’d bought the ring three days ago. Since then, the question had been settled in my mind even if I hadn’t said it aloud. I hadn’t been waiting for some perfect moment. I’d only wanted one that belonged to us, and sitting beside her on our back porch while Ellie dozed in the grass felt right.

Katy saw it. Her breath caught -- a small, sharp inhale that traveled through her ribs and into the shoulder pressed against mine -- and she went still. Completely still. The kind of stillness that came from a body deciding, all at once, that whatever happened next deserved its full attention.

I opened the box.

The ring sat on black velvet. White-gold band, thin, unembellished except for the small round diamond set flush into the metal. Nothing excessive. Nothing that would catch on things or require insurance or make her self-conscious when she washed her hands. I’d chosen it because it looked like something she’d actually wear, and because the woman behind the counter had nodded when I described her and said, “She’s practical, then,” and I’d said, “She’s survived,” and the woman had understood more than I’d said, which was its own kind of relief.

Katy’s gaze found the ring. Then found my face. Her bottom lip had caught between her teeth -- the gesture she made when something landed harder than she’d prepared for -- and the cut above her eyebrow, long since healed to a thin white line that caught the porch light at certain angles, was suddenly, startlingly present, as though the body kept receipts for everything it survived.

“Marry me, Katy.”

I kept my voice steady, but that was about the extent of my control. I’d faced trauma bays, combat zones, and more bad outcomes than I cared to count without struggling for words. Sitting beside Katy with a ring in my hand was apparently different. I looked at her while I spoke, refusing to retreat into the composure that usually came so easily. She deserved to see exactly how much this mattered to me.

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Whatever word lived behind her teeth -- and there was a word, I could see it forming, the particular shape of a syllable that had gravity and intention -- never made it to air.

Footsteps pounded across the gravel behind us, fast and unmistakably headed our way.

Ellie stood there in her grass-stained shorts, one ponytail holder dangling from a strand of hair that had escaped entirely, her face flushed with the triumph of a child who had been holding a secret and could no longer contain it. Biscuit shoved past her legs, his claws clicking on the porch boards, and launched himself into the yard with the enthusiasm of a dog who had identified a situation requiring investigation but had not yet determined whether barking was appropriate.

“I already knew!” Ellie announced. Her voice carried across the porch and into the yard with the complete, unassailable authority of an eight-year-old who had caught adults being predictable and found it delightful. “I knew you were going to ask because I found the box in your sock drawer a whole week ago! It was under the blue ones with the holes that Mom says you need to throw away but you won’t because you’re stubborn.”

I looked at her for a long second, taking in the child who had apparently violated the sanctity of my sock drawer and now felt compelled to announce the crime to the entire county. Whatever response she expected from me, I wasn’t prepared to give her the satisfaction.

“You went through my sock drawer.”

Ellie lifted her chin. Her blue-gray gaze held mine with the particular steadiness of a child who had calculated the risk and found the payoff acceptable. “I was looking for the good scissors. The ones that cut fabric, not the paper ones, because I’m making something and I’m not telling you what yet.” She delivered this with the particular satisfaction of a kid who had successfully steered the conversation away from her own crime and onto a mystery of her choosing, then spun back toward the yard before either of us could ask.

I turned back to Katy. The ring still sat open in its box between us, waiting, and her eyes had gone bright in the porch light, her mouth doing the thing it did when she was fighting a smile and losing badly.

“Yes,” she said. Simple. Certain. The word she’d been holding behind her teeth since the screen door banged open, finally let out into the air where it belonged. “Yes, obviously. Ask a woman to marry you and then get interrupted by her own daughter’s espionage -- see what she says.”

I slid the ring onto her finger. It fit, just as the woman behind the jewelry counter in Jefferson City had promised it would, and Katy held her hand up to the porch light and turned it once, watching the small diamond catch what was left of the evening.

Later I gave her the other thing. She’d mentioned it once, months back, on a night I wasn’t meant to be listening -- the framed photograph of Ellie’s first birthday, left behind on an Indiana wall along with the runaway cat and the bookshelf and every other small anchor a life collects without meaning to.

I hadn’t forgotten. Wire had a watch on local shelters for the missing cat. I’d spent an evening in October going through years of her cloud backups with her permission and her direction until I found it -- blurry, off-center, Ellie’s face smeared with frosting and joy -- and had it printed and framed and hung in the hallway between the bathroom and the guest room before she noticed it was missing from wherever she kept it in her head. She found it that evening. Didn’t say anything about it. Just stood in the hallway a long time with her fingers resting on the frame, and that had been its own kind of conversation, the kind that doesn’t need words to finish.

By the time we carried Ellie inside, the yard had gone fully quiet, the last voices fading toward the clubhouse, and the fire reduced to coals that glowed and dimmed in the dark. Katy and I walked back to the house with Ellie asleep against my shoulder and Biscuit trotting a slow zigzag ahead of us, nose down, chasing scents that existed for him and no one else.

I put Ellie to bed. Katy found me in the garage a while later, checking the oil on the bike like I checked everything, methodical, unhurried, and when I looked up she had her arms crossed and a look on her face I’d learned to read as a question before she’d finished asking it.

“Take me somewhere,” she said.

I did. She climbed on behind me in the dark, her arms circling my ribs, her cheek against my back between my shoulder blades, and I eased the bike down the gravel drive with the headlight cutting a narrow path through country dark thick enough to touch. We didn’t go far. Out to the county road and back, the engine’s low thunder the only conversation either of us needed, her body solid and certain against me the whole way, and when we pulled back into the drive she didn’t let go right away, and I didn’t ask her to.

The compound lights blinked steadily through the trees behind us. Somewhere in the house, a rock collection sat arranged on a windowsill by a system only its curator understood, and a photograph hung in a hallway where it had always belonged, and a woman with a new ring on her hand held on to me in the dark like she had nowhere left to run to -- because she didn’t. Because she’d stopped needing anywhere but here.