Chapter 227

Chapter 227
Summer's POV

"Good," Logan said simply. "You guys deserve it. After everything..." He didn't finish the sentence, but I knew what he meant. After everything we'd been through, we deserved this chance at a normal life, at happiness that wasn't overshadowed by fear or violence or the threat of losing each other.

Kieran proposed during our senior year, on a cold December evening when snow was falling softly over the Charles River. We'd gone for a walk after finishing our final exams, both of us giddy with relief and exhaustion, and he'd led me to the exact spot where we'd had our first real conversation about the future—about dreams and hope and the possibility of building something beautiful together. He didn't have a ring yet, just a promise and a question spoken softly into the winter air: "Will you marry me, Summer? Will you let me spend the rest of my life loving you?"

I said yes before he'd even finished asking, and we stood there in the snow, holding each other and laughing and crying all at once, while the city lights reflected off the frozen river and made everything look like a fairy tale.

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Kieran graduated summa cum laude with a double major in physics and computer science, and I graduated magna cum laude with a degree in music performance and a minor in creative writing. We moved into a small apartment in Cambridge, close enough to MIT that Kieran could continue his research work while also starting to develop his own projects. He'd become fascinated with artificial intelligence during his junior year, had started working with a professor on machine learning algorithms, and now he was determined to build something revolutionary—something that could change the world the way he'd once dreamed of doing through pure physics research.

I took a job teaching piano at a music school in Boston while also performing with the Boston Civic Symphony on weekends, and we settled into a comfortable rhythm of work and love and quiet domesticity. Catherine and Lily came over for dinner every Sunday, and my mother visited once a month, and slowly, carefully, our two families learned to exist together in the same space without tension or judgment.

Two years after graduation, Kieran's startup took off. He'd developed an AI system that could predict market trends with unprecedented accuracy, and suddenly venture capitalists were throwing money at him, tech giants were trying to acquire his company, and Forbes was calling him "Boston's Most Promising Young CEO." He moved the company into a sleek office space in Kendall Square, hired a team of brilliant engineers and developers, and somehow managed to stay grounded through it all—still the same boy who'd worked in a restaurant kitchen to pay for his sister's medical bills, still the same young man who'd chosen love over pride and family over ambition.

He did it all without my mother's help, too—refused every offer of investment or connection she made, determined to prove that he could build his empire on his own merit. Victoria respected that, even if she occasionally teased him about his stubbornness, and I loved him even more for his fierce independence, for his need to know that everything he achieved was truly his.

"I couldn't have done any of this without you," he told me one night, lying in bed with his arms around me and his face buried in my hair. "You know that, right? Everything I've built, everything I've become—it's because you believed in me when nobody else did."

"That's not true," I said softly. "Your mom believed in you. Lily believed in you. You just needed to believe in yourself."

"Maybe," he conceded. "But you were the one who showed me it was possible. You were the one who made me want to be better, to do better." He pressed a kiss to my temple. "I love you, Summer. I've loved you since I was seventeen years old, and I'm going to love you until the day I die."

I turned in his arms to face him, and in the dim light from the street lamp outside our window, I could see the boy he'd been and the man he'd become all at once—the scared teenager who'd pushed me away to protect me, the fierce protector who'd faced down his father's rage, the brilliant entrepreneur who'd built an empire from nothing. He was all of these things and more, and he was mine.

"Marry me," I said, even though we'd been engaged for two years now, even though we'd been planning the wedding for months. "Marry me, Kieran Cross. Let's stop waiting for the perfect moment and just do it."

He laughed, surprised and delighted. "Are you proposing to me?"

"Yes," I said firmly. "I'm proposing. Marry me."

"Okay," he said, still laughing. "Okay, yes. Let's get married."