Page 66 of Finding Home

“The rain has stopped,” he told his sister.

“There you go,” Meg replied.

Julie stepped outside.

The cold was immediate and clean, the kind that emptied your lungs on the first breath and made everything sharper.

She looked up at the sky and picked out the Pleiades low over the ridge, and the wide sweep of the Milky Way running north to south like something spilled and left there.

Cole stood beside her. He didn’t say anything at first.

That was something she’d grown to trust about him. He didn’t fill silences because they made him uneasy. He let them be what they were.

After a while, she tilted her head a little further back.

“You can’t get a sky like this anywhere else,” she said.

“No,” Cole agreed. “You can’t.”

The lights from the cottage fell in a soft rectangle across the frozen grass. Inside, the Christmas tree blinked steadily through the front window. She could just make out the silhouette of the star at the top.

When she first arrived in Sapphire Bay, Julie thought the sky was the loneliest thing about it. All that space and nothing to anchor you. She’d stood outside her cottage more than once in those early weeks, looking up and feeling the distance between herself and everything she thought she was supposed to be.

It didn’t feel that way now.

Cole reached into the front pocket of his jacket—the one that was still around her shoulders—and took out something small. He turned it over in his hand once, then held it where she could see it.

It was a ring. Small and plain, the kind that didn’t announce itself. She looked at it, and then she looked at Cole.

“I’ve been thinking about this ring for a few weeks,” he told her. “Trying to work out when it was the right time.” He paused. “I don’t think there’s ever a right time. I think you just get to a point where waiting feels like the wrong choice.”

Julie’s hands were still at her sides. She didn’t move them.

“It belonged to my grandmother,” Cole said. “She loved her family and worked hard. She wore this ring for fifty-two years and it was part of her.” He looked at it, then into Julie’s eyes. “I’ve never wanted to give it to anyone before. I want to give it to you.”

Julie looked down at the ring. Cole’s hands were trembling, and she loved him all the more for it.

“Julie.” He said her name as if it were the whole sentence. “I wasn’t looking for this. I want you to know that. I wasn’t looking for anything when I came to Sapphire Bay, except a place to call home. And then I met you, and you took the floor out from under me, and I haven’t been entirely level since.”

She kissed Cole’s cheek. “I wasn’t feeling very level either,” she said quietly. “Just so you know.”

Cole’s hand brushed the side of her face. “I know there’s less road ahead of us than there might have been, and I know you’ve built something here that matters to you. I’m not asking you to give any of that up.” He looked at her steadily. “I love you, Julie, and I’m asking if there’s room in your life for me. Will you marry me?”

Julie looked into Cole’s eyes. They were as bright as the stars above them.

She was aware of the warmth of his jacket across her shoulders, of the stillness of the land, of the faint sound of laughter from inside the cottage.

She had been on her own for a long time. Not unhappily. That was the important part. She’d learned how to live her own life without leaning against someone else for support. She was not afraid of being alone. She understood it.

But this was different. Cole saw the person she was today, and wanted to be part of her life. She reached out and took the ring from his palm.

She held it for a moment, feeling its smallness. A woman she’d never met had worn this through fifty-two years of ordinary days, and there was more life in it than any statement piece could have carried.

“Yes,” she said.

Cole was quiet for a second.

“Just yes?” he asked.