Chapter 277: Reid
I pick Northhaven at dusk because that’s where it started—salt on the air and gulls heckling the last of the day, halyards ticking a nervous rhythm against masts, the whole harbor breathing in that slow, tidal way that used to feel like mine and Jake’s alone until a girl with copper hair walked onto our docks and rewired the place, rewired me; this is where I saw her for the first time with wind in her curls and a sherpa jacket swallowing her small frame, where I acted like a bastard because softness scared me more than any storm, where I lifted her against the brick behind Seafoam and kissed her like a drowning man who’d finally stopped fighting the tide; it’s where she pressed two sea-glass keychains into our palms and called them good-luck charms and we’ve carried them like talismans ever since, where she stood on our bow and made science sound holy, where she put SWMRI on the damn map with that nursery and that humpback and that unstoppable brain of hers.
“I’m fucking nervous,” I tell Jake, and the word fogs in the cold and vanishes but the truth of it stays.
He huffs something like a laugh and shakes his head, the scrape on his jaw a thin pink crescent in the harbor light. “Same.”
We said we wouldn’t ever fight over her, and then last night we did anyway—words first, sharp and stupid, then knuckles because we’re idiots and brothers and both wanted to be the one with a name on a piece of paper that means nothing and everything; I’ve got a bloom of ache under my ribs where his right hook lives and he’s got that scrape, and we both said sorry the way we do—ice on the bruise, whiskey we didn’t finish, foreheads pressed until the anger drained out and the simple thing remained: it’s all ridiculous, because we’re already hers for life and we’re already dads, somehow, to a son and a daughter who kick when I talk into Madeline’s belly like they’re answering back, and who cares which signature sits next to hers when the only contract that matters is the one she wrote into our bones the night she said I love you against my mouth.
I roll the ring between finger and thumb—thin gold band, oval stone that catches whatever light exists and throws it back like a shard of daybreak—and try not to think about the way my hands shook when we bought it in that tiny shop two towns over, or the ridiculous middle-of-the-night measuring tape we snuck around her ring finger while she slept with her palm open and trusting against my chest. Jake paces three steps one way and three back, as if moving will keep his heart from bolting.
“You gonna talk,” he asks, “or do I?”
“Both,” I say, because there’s too much of us in this to let one voice carry it. “I’ll start.”
He nods, and for a moment we just stand there—two big men in dark coats, side by side like always, looking out over the water where our boat sits quiet and clean as a blade, the same boat that saw our worst and our best, the same deck where I watched her blood spill and where she bled into my hands and didn’t die, the same rails I jumped from when I thought I’d never breathe again if I didn’t get to her—until footsteps scrape the planks behind us and the whole harbor sharpens.
Madeline.
She’s in one of my sweaters and one of Jake’s scarves and my coat over both like she’s been stealing our heat on purpose, hair braided loose with tendrils gone stubborn around her face, cheeks pinked by the cold, eyes greener than any water I’ve crossed, and the swell of her under the wool is a miracle that makes my throat burn; she smiles when she spots us, that soft, disarming smile that has wrecked me since day one, and I swear the docks tilt toward her.
“What are you two up to?” she asks, amused and already suspicious, because she knows us—knows the set of Jake’s shoulders when he’s pretending he’s not vibrating, knows the way I keep a thing in my pocket when I’m scared of it.
“Walk with us,” Jake says, and offers his arm like a gentleman, and she slides her hand into the crook of his elbow and threads the fingers of her other hand through mine and we move toward Seafoam like the three stars in a tiny constellation, past windows throwing warm brass light onto the planks, past the spot where I first kissed her and told myself I wouldn’t take more and then immediately wanted everything.
We stop where brick turns to shadow and the wall still remembers our mouths, and I take a breath that feels like it might split me and turn to face her; Jake steps in on her other side and we’re a small circle against the wind.
“I picked here,” I say, and my voice comes out lower than I intended, “because this town is where I learned what my life is supposed to feel like.” I tip my chin toward the water, toward the place that made us and the girl who remade me. “You walked into it with sea-glass and freckles and that brain that makes professors stumble, and I was mean and cold and thought I had a good reason until you laughed on my deck and made me want to be every version of good I didn’t think I had.”
Her eyes shine and she bites her lip and nods like if she talks she’ll cry, so I keep going because if I stop now I’ll never start again. “I have been wet and freezing and lost and black-eyed and blood-knuckled and happier than I knew a man could be, and I’ve been on my knees on a deck with your blood on my hands and I have never prayed in my life until that night—and you stayed, Trouble. You stayed. You breathe. You make this place home. You made me soft and you didn’t make me smaller.”
Jake clears his throat, and it breaks on the first word because of course it does. “You gave us family,” he says, voice rough and steady at once. “You gave us work that feels like a future. You gave us two little conspirators who already kick when I talk to them, and you gave me a version of my brother that laughs more, and I don’t ever want to go back to the one where we didn’t have you to come home to.”
Her hand flies to her mouth, then to her belly, then back to my coat like she needs to touch all three of us to keep the world from spinning off.
I look at Jake and he looks at me and we both learn forward at the same time without planning it, because that’s how we’re built; I take the ring from my pocket and his palm settles under mine like a ledge, and together we hold it out to her, bright and ridiculous and exactly right.
“We don’t care what the papers say,” I tell her, honest and open because anything else would be an insult to what she is. “If you want to choose whose name sits next to yours, we’ll live with that and make it sacred; if you want to flip a coin, we’ll flip it; if you want us to draw straws or carve it into the hull—we’ll do it. Legal is logistics. This is the vow.”
Jake nods, eyes wet. “This is forever.”
“So,” I say, and my hands are shaking and I don’t even try to hide it, “Madeline Quinn—our genius, our light, the mother of our babies—will you marry us?”
The harbor holds its breath. Somewhere out on the moorings a bell rings once, and a seal coughs like an old man, and all I can hear is her heartbeat and the water and the blood in my ears while I wait for the only word I’ve ever wanted more than yes.