Chapter 196 THE QUESTION

Chapter 196 THE QUESTION

DAMON'S POV

The house settled sometime around noon.

Not peacefully. It wasn't that kind of settling. More the way things settle when they've been moving fast for a long time and the people inside them have collectively run out of immediate decisions to make and have arrived at the specific, exhausted stillness that follows a night like the one we'd just been through.

Lyanna was sleeping on the couch in the living room, which I discovered when i went to check for her and covered her with a blanket, so as not to disturb her (she’d earned it more than anyone earns anything these days).

Diane was upstairs with Marcus, the monitors having resumed their normal schedule, the figures on her chart simply reaffirming that the baby is remained miraculously, wonderfuly and stubbornly fine.

Elena was in the study with the garden phone sealed in an evidence bag and her laptop open, doing something technical that she'd explained briefly and that I'd understood well enough to know was useful and didn't require my involvement.

Seraphina was in the kitchen.

I leaned in the doorway for a second before she knew I was there, watching the sight of her there at the kitchen table with a mug of cold tea in front of her, and the bassinet at her hip.

The morning coming in at this angle through the window. It hit me: the very first time I’d leaned in a doorway watching her from outside without her knowing. A gallery.

A whole life ago.

All the time that’s come between then and now, and the sheer impossible pressure of standing in this kitchen, here, with her, in the wake of this particular, impossible night.

She looked up and found me in the doorway.

She didn't say anything, just looked, and I crossed the room and sat down across from her and we looked at each other for a moment in the quiet kitchen, two people taking stock of the same event from opposite sides of it.

"You should sleep," she said.

"So should you," I said.

"I can't," she said. "Not yet. My brain won't stop whining."

"I know."

She looked at Marcus, at his face in the bassinet, and something in her expression did the thing it does when she's feeling something large and is deciding how much of it to let out into the room.

"I keep thinking about three years ago," she said. "About him sitting somewhere, planning this, before Marcus existed. Before I even knew what I wanted my life to look like. And I think about how different everything could have been if any one thing had gone differently. If Kessler hadn't made the mistakes he made, if the seventh name hadn't decided to honour a debt, if you hadn't..." She stopped.

"If I hadn't what?" I nudged.

"If you hadn't been who you are," she said, simply, which was the kind of thing she said sometimes that landed in a way I still wasn't entirely equipped for, after everything.

I reached across the table.

She put her hand in mine.

We were still that way for some time, the morning continuing to bloom in its oblivious way, Marcus still sleeping in his bassinet and the house being itself in that particular way it’s own occupants are finally silent in.

And then I took from my jacket pocket the small box that I’ve carried with me now for the last three weeks.

A box that made it through the storage unit, the parking garage, and a morning too busy to spare any waking hour more immediately critical than this one.

I placed it on the table between us. She glanced from it to me.

"Now," she said. "You're doing this now. After everything that just happened."

"I've been trying to do it for three weeks," I said. "Every time I found what I thought was the right moment something happened."

"Something always happens," she said.

"Yes," I said. "Which is why I've decided to stop waiting for the right moment and do it in whatever moment is currently available." I looked at her. "This is the moment currently available."

She looked at the box.

At me.

At Marcus.

At me again, with the full look, the one that goes all the way through and comes out the other side with something decided.

"Ask me then," she said.

I opened the box.

I asked her.

There was silence for so long that I heard it second by second, felt it second by second, the unique tension of having uttered the truest sentence that came to your mind, and having then to deal with whatever your opposite number was going to do with it.

And then she said yes.

It wasn't straight away, there was one beat of silence just before that, it wasn't quite hesitation, it was simply the digesting of something immense having just entered a place inhabited by two people, but then it was yes, that's it, one word, neat and full and hers.

I slid the ring on her finger.

She looked at it for a minute or so in the way she looks at things she wants to store away for future reference.

Then she looked up at me and said: "I'm going to need you to go wake Lyanna."

"Absolutely not," I said.

"She's going to be devastated if she finds out she slept through..."

"She can be devastated," I said. "She's asleep."

"Damon."

"She is asleep on a sofa after the worst night of anyone's life and I am not waking her up for any reason that doesn't involve the building being on fire."

Seraphina looked at me for a moment.

Then she stood up, leaned across the table, kissed me with the warmth of someone who has just said yes to a future with a person and is starting that future right now in a kitchen at noon, and went to wake Lyanna.

I sat back and listened to what happened from the kitchen when she did, which could probably be heard from two streets away, and thought about five weeks, and a wedding, and a man who had been planning for three years and had not once, across any of those three years, planned for this.