Page 177 of Only the Hunter

“Those seats fold down,” she says.

I turn to look at her.

She has the look she gets when she’s already decided something and is simply choosing the moment to say so—the slight lift of her chin, the look in her eyes that says she’s assessed the situation and reached her conclusion and would like to know if I have any objections.

I do not have any objections.

“We’re wearing good clothes,” I say.

“I’m aware.”

“Your father just asked me about my intentions.”

“Your timing has always been questionable,” she says, and she’s already moving to the back.

The seats fold flat.

We figure out the logistics of a rental SUV together, which involves less grace and more laughter than either of us would admit to in a professional context. Her heel catches on the center console. My shoulder—still occasionally problematic—makes its opinion known.

“Are you⁠—”

“Fine,” I say. “Don’t stop.”

She laughs, really laughs, the kind that isn’t performative and isn’t careful, and I feel it somewhere structural—the same place I felt it the first time she laughed like that in front of me, before we’d moved in together, and I understood that I was in serious trouble.

I’ve been in serious trouble for a very long time.

I am completely at peace with that.

The park is quiet around us. The river moves in the distance. Somewhere on the far bank, suburbia keeps running—indifferent, lit, continuous—and in here the windows are fogged and Evie is warm against my side and her hair is loose and she’s tracing something idle on my chest with one finger the way she does when she’s thinking.

“What,” I say.

“Nothing.”

“You’re thinking something.”

A pause. “When you propose,” she says, “don’t do it somewhere my father chose.”

“I hadn’t planned to.”

“And don’t make it a thing. I don’t want—” She waves a hand that gestures at everything she doesn’t want, which I understand to mean: photographers, productions, any version of public that involves strangers looking at her face.

“Noted.”

“Something real,” she says. “Just—” She stops. Starts again. “Just like this.”

I look at the top of her head. The way she fits against me, her head on my shoulder, her breathing slowed to the pace of someone who has finally—finally—stopped working and allowed herself a vacation.

I think about a photo in my wallet that I’ve been carrying for fifteen years. A teenage Evie at a football game, laughing at something out of frame, completely unaware she would be saved in that moment in time.

She’s been in my pocket the whole time.

“Just like this,” I say.

She tilts her face up and I bend down and we meet somewhere in the middle, easy and certain, the way we do most things now that we’ve stopped making it complicated.

She used to dream about me from a distance—unreachable, half-remembered, gone by morning.