Page 97 of Critical Hours

“Ours,” she agreed.

He reached into his jacket pocket.

Maren saw the box before he opened it.He watched the recognition cross her face — the small velvet box, the shape of it, the unmistakable meaning — and he watched her go still the way she’d gone still on the porch the night she’d told him his heart rate was elevated.Assessing.Reading.

He opened the box.The ring caught the late afternoon light — a simple band, a single stone, the kind of ring a woman could wear for the rest of her life without taking it off.

“Maren.”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t asked yet.”

“I know.But the answer is yes.It’s been yes since the bakery.”Her eyes were bright, and her voice was steady, and her hands were exactly as still as they’d been every time she’d ever reached for something that mattered.“Ask me anyway.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

He slid the ring onto her finger.It fit.He’d measured while she slept — a loop of thread around her ring finger at two in the morning, held up to a ruler in the bathroom, because he was a man who planned for things and this was the most important thing he’d ever planned for.

She looked at the ring on her hand.Turned it once.Held her hand up so the stone caught the light from the water.

“Something I can wear to work,” she said.

“That’s what I asked for.”

“You asked a jeweler what kind of ring a nurse could wear to work.”

“I described your hands.She did the rest.”

Maren put both palms on his chest.The ring was cool against his skin through the fabric of his shirt.She tilted her face up and kissed him — a slow kiss, the kind of kiss a woman gives a man on the porch of a house they just bought together, on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-December, with a phone full of news she hadn’t made yet.

She pulled back.

“I need to call my mother.”

“I assumed.”

“She’s going to make a brisket.”

“For the engagement?”

“It’s a thing.”

“Is it?”

“It is now.”

She picked up her phone from the porch chair where she’d left it earlier.She walked to the far end of the porch and stopped.When she turned to face him, her expression was his favorite one.Her face was soft, her lips shiny from the moisture her tongue swiped across them, her eyes stared into his.

“I love you, Graham.”

His cheeks puffed when he smiled as big as he did now.“I love you too, Maren.”

She stepped forward and kissed him softly.He kissed her back, then she turned and tapped her phone and pressed it to her ear.He watched her for a moment — the cadence of her shoulders when Sandra picked up, the small, sharp laugh that came out of her when she said something he couldn’t hear, the way she put her free hand against the railing and looked out at the inlet while she talked to her mother about the rest of her life.

He walked back to the railing.

The wind chimes moved in a slow current of air off the water.The sound carried, quiet and steady, through the screen and into the house and back out again.

In the shallows, the heron lifted its head.It took one slow step forward.

Graham stood at the railing of the house he owned and listened to the woman he loved tell her mother they were getting married.He let the wind chimes hold him there for a moment longer.

Then he went inside to start the rest of his life.