POV: Jasmine
I lifted my head in the dark.
"Are you serious," I said. It wasn't quite a question — it was already arriving at its own answer.
"Yes."
I lay there with that for a moment. The ceiling above us was dark and the apartment was quiet and his chest rose and fell beneath my cheek, steady and unhurried, a man who had said the true thing and was waiting without performing patience.
"Is it because of Asher," I said. "Or Jackson. Or any of what tonight was."
"No." His hand moved slowly up my back. "I have been meaning it for a year. I have been waiting for a clean moment, and I understand now that there is no clean moment."
"There is only the life we are already in, and I do not want to wait for quiet that is not coming." A pause. "I want to be your husband now, Jasmine. Not eventually."
The sentence sat in the dark between us, and I felt the truth of it — not as information I was receiving but as recognition, the arrival of something I had already known without quite having the language for it.
I set my chin back on his chest.
"Yes," I said. Once. It did not need anything added to it.
He rolled me under him and held my face in both hands. Looked at me in the dark — the full weight of him above me, unhurried, the person who had arrived at the worst possible moment and refused, quietly, to be a problem I could organise away.
He was laughing slightly. I was laughing too. Joy had run out of room and was coming out the only way available.
"I do not want a wedding," I told him when the laughing settled. "I want it small. Genuinely small. Not industry-small."
"Done."
"I don't want a ring right now either."
"You can have anything you want when you're ready. Or nothing. Whatever you want."
I believed him, which was not something I had found easy to believe about people for most of my life, and which I had stopped being surprised about when it came to him.
We talked in the dark — not in full sentences, not in order, trading names and ideas without needing them to connect formally.
Leo and Nora. Finn. Asher, when Asher was ready to be somewhere other than behind his own walls. Martha and Frank, who had built a place that held people in it without asking for justification.
Priya as witness, because Priya had been present for every version of both of us and had not blinked at any of them. Aurora, who would not understand what she was watching and would be deeply invested in the flowers regardless.
The ranch, we decided. It had been arriving at this for a long time, that piece of land with its strawberries and its woodwork and its particular mornings.
"Aurora rigged it," Liam said.
"She absolutely rigged it."
"From inside the womb."
"She has always been very strategic."
I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of that, curled against the side of him, and the last thing I registered was his hand in my hair and the uncomplicated warmth of a night that had been complicated by everything except the thing that mattered most.
I slept better than I had in weeks.
In the morning I did not say it again and neither did he. That was its own confirmation — a decision already made settling into the ordinary grammar of the day without needing to be announced.
He made coffee. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and the beginning of a structure for the Eleanor response, and Aurora woke up and demanded to be carried and both of us reached for her at the same time and then negotiated the outcome quietly, which was badly and affectionately and with no lasting damage.
The following afternoon I came out of the shower to find him already in the tuxedo.
He looked extraordinary in it — the presence that made a room organise itself around him without his doing anything in particular to cause it.
The gown across the bed was midnight blue, floor-length, the one I had mentioned once without committing to. Apparently he had committed on my behalf, which was entirely in character.
Cadence was being honored tonight — an industry ceremony, a room full of people who understood the same references and laughed at the same moments. I had been looking forward to it with the pleasure of an evening that was professional without being a crisis.
From the living room I could hear Nora and Leo, and beneath both of them the cartoon Aurora had been fixated on for weeks.
She had arrived half an hour ago, Leo with her, both of them moving through the apartment without needing to ask where anything was.
I dressed. Liam stood behind me and drew the zip up slowly — one inch, a pause, his mouth at the curve of my shoulder, warm and deliberate and entirely aware of what he was doing to my ability to care about being on time.
The gown settled. I leaned back against him, his hands at my waist, his chin at my temple, both of us looking at the mirror, holding between us something we had not told anyone yet.
Nora's voice from the living room: "Car's downstairs."
I kissed Aurora goodbye. She was on Leo's lap with the carved rainbow unicorn, a cartoon playing, her full attention distributed between both. She submitted to the kiss without looking up.
Leo caught my eye over her head.
"Go," he said. Quietly, without building to it. "We have her."
I took Liam's arm.
In the hallway, the elevator doors were already open. Liam's phone rang.
He looked at the screen, and I watched his face change — not collapse, not alarm, but a rapid recalibration. The version of him that had been in that bedroom a minute ago stepping back, the other one — measured, professional — stepping forward to take the call.
He picked up.
"Priya," he said. And I watched his face change again.