Chapter 100: The Proposal

Maya expected it at the oak tree.

She'd been expecting it for weeks, actually—reading the signs with the same architectural precision she applied to buildings. The way Eli's eyes lingered on jewelry store windows in Portland. The whispered phone calls with Hannah that stopped abruptly when Maya entered the room. The fact that Marco, who could not keep a secret under torture, avoided eye contact every time Maya mentioned the future.

She expected the oak tree because it was their place—the site of the first kiss, the midnight confession, the setting of every significant moment in their shared history. Eli was a romantic and a creature of pattern. He would propose at the oak tree, probably at night, probably with some literary reference that would make her cry.

She was wrong about everything.

---

It happened on a Wednesday morning in mid-May—the kind of morning that made people write songs about Oregon, blue-skied and wildflower-scented and warm enough for bare feet on the porch.

Maya was in the kitchen, trying to reach a mug on the top shelf. At seven months pregnant, her center of gravity had shifted dramatically, and reaching for anything above shoulder height felt like an engineering challenge.

"Here," Eli said, appearing beside her and retrieving the mug with the ease of a man who was six feet tall and not carrying an extra human.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He poured her tea. She sat at the table. He sat across from her. The morning light came through the window and landed on the table between them, illuminating the scratches in the wood and the coffee ring stains and the general, beautiful disorder of a surface that two people actually used.

"Maya," Eli said.

"Yeah?"

"Marry me."

No oak tree. No moonlight. No literary reference. Just two words, spoken over tea, at the kitchen table, on a Wednesday morning.

Maya set down her mug.

"You're serious."

"I've been serious since I was fifteen." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box—not the old box, not the ring from the pawnshop that he'd kept for a decade. A new box. A new ring.

He opened it. Inside was a band of rose gold—not silver, not the thin, desperate ring of an eighteen-year-old's savings, but something crafted with intention and maturity. Set into the band, instead of a diamond, was a small rose quartz—pink, warm, the color of the marble on Rose's memorial stone.

"I had it made," he said. "Isamu Tanaka—the stonemason who carved the memorial. I asked him to cut the stone. Rose quartz, for Rose."

Maya looked at the ring. She looked at Eli. She looked at the kitchen—their kitchen, the room where they'd had their first kiss and their worst fight and a thousand unremarkable meals that had accumulated into a life.

"No speech?" she asked.

"No speech. I've had twelve years to prepare a speech, and every version I wrote was too much or too little. So I'm just going to say the truth." He took her hand. "You are the most infuriating, brilliant, stubborn, beautiful, complicated person I've ever known. You broke my heart when you were eighteen, and you rebuilt it when you came back. I want to spend the rest of my life watching you design buildings and argue with librarians and throw up every morning because our daughter is apparently allergic to protein."

"She's not allergic to protein—"

"I'm not finished." He squeezed her hand. "I want the boring Tuesdays, Maya. All of them. Every single unremarkable, extraordinary, impossibly ordinary Tuesday. I want to make you breakfast and argue about the thermostat and fall asleep on the couch while you read blueprints. I want to be the person who hands you the mug you can't reach and catches you when your center of gravity shifts."

"Eli—"

"Marry me. Not because it's dramatic or romantic or the kind of story people tell at dinner parties. Marry me because it's Wednesday, and we're in the kitchen, and this is the life. Right here. Right now. This is the life I want."

Maya looked at the ring—the rose quartz, warm and pink, the color of love that had been tested and survived. She thought about Rose and James, married in a chapel the size of a closet. About the silver ring hidden in the wall, the inscription that said *R.T. + J.S. — Portland — July 18, 1943.* About the wedding that the world had tried to erase and that love had preserved, hidden in cedar, for eighty years.

"Yes," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Yes, Eli Santos. I'll marry you. On a Wednesday. In the kitchen. Because this is the life."

He put the ring on her finger—it fit perfectly, because of course it did, because Eli Santos had been measuring her for this moment for twelve years—and then he was around the table and she was in his arms and they were kissing, and the tea was getting cold and the sun was moving across the kitchen floor and somewhere a bird was singing, and it was the most ordinary, perfect, unremarkable moment of her life.

"I love you," she said against his mouth.

"I love you too." He pulled back to look at her, his eyes bright, his smile the smile of a man who'd just received the answer to a question he'd been asking since adolescence. "I have one condition."

"A condition?"

"The wedding has to be at the oak tree."

"Of course it does."

"And Mrs. Kovac has to officiate."

"Mrs. Kovac is a librarian, not a minister."

"She got ordained online last week. Hannah told me."

"Mrs. Kovac got ordained online?"

"She said, and I quote: 'If I've survived Nazis, I can certainly marry two people who've been too stubborn to do it themselves.'"

Maya laughed—the deep, shaking, full-body laugh that she'd rediscovered in Willow Creek—and Eli laughed with her, and the sound filled the kitchen and spilled through the house and drifted through the open windows into the garden, where the white roses were blooming and the memorial stones were warm in the morning sun.

---

The news traveled through Willow Creek with the speed of wildfire.

Jenny Walker's doorbell camera recorded Eli arriving at the Victorian with flowers—a preemptive celebration—and within the hour, every phone in town was buzzing.

Mrs. Patterson arrived at noon with a flower arrangement that could have been a centerpiece at a state dinner. "I've been saving these for the occasion," she said, which implied she'd been growing wedding flowers for Maya since she arrived in town. Knowing Mrs. Patterson, this was probably true.

Hannah burst through the door at 12:15, having closed the bakery—for the second time in six months, a record that would be discussed for years—and embraced Maya with the ferocity of a woman who'd been waiting for this moment longer than either of them.

"Finally," Hannah said, crying and laughing simultaneously. "Finally, finally, finally."

"You knew?"

"I've known since he asked me to help pick the ring. Three weeks ago. In the jewelry store. Where I didn't cry, because I'm a professional." She was very clearly crying now. "You're going to be my sister."

"I'm already your sister."

"You're going to be my *legal* sister. Which means I can legally force you to attend holiday dinners."

"You already force me to attend holiday dinners."

"Now I have a certificate." Hannah pulled back and examined the ring. "Rose quartz. Perfect. He wanted to use his grandmother's sapphire, but I told him that this was about you and Rose, not the Santos family heirlooms."

"Thank you for that."

"I'm your best friend. Jewel management is part of the job description."

Mrs. Kovac called at 1 p.m. Her voice carried the satisfaction of a woman whose plans had come together exactly as she'd intended.

"I'm available the third Saturday in June," she said. "The weather should be good. The roses will be in full bloom. And I've prepared a ceremony that includes Whitman, because if we're going to do this, we're going to do it properly."

"You've already planned the ceremony?"

"I've been planning this ceremony since you sat in my library and cried over your grandmother's diary. Some things are inevitable, Maya. Love, in this family, is one of them."

Maya hung up and stood in the kitchen with her ring catching the light and her baby kicking gently against her ribs and her phone buzzing with congratulations from a town that had decided, months ago, that she and Eli were destined and had simply been waiting for them to catch up.

She looked at the ring. Rose quartz. The color of love. The color of her grandmother's memorial stone. The color of the dawn that came through the Victorian's windows every morning and fell on two people in a bed that had waited sixty years for this much happiness.

"Good morning, Rose," she whispered. "He asked. I said yes."

And in the garden, as if in answer, the white roses turned their faces to the sun.