Chapter 91 Bonus Story Four: The Birthday Gift at Twenty-Two Bonus Chapter 19: The Secret He Kept Since Fourteen

Chapter 91 Bonus Story Four: The Birthday Gift at Twenty-Two
Bonus Chapter 19: The Secret He Kept Since Fourteen
Mason found the journal in the study of the old house.
It was Nathan’s journal.
It had been hidden at the very bottom of an unremarkable cardboard box, buried beneath a stack of old lab reports. The notebook had a brown cover, its corners worn down until the gray-white cardboard beneath showed through. Nothing was written on the front.
But when Mason opened the first page, he recognized Nathan’s handwriting at once.
Neat. Slender. Meticulous.
Exactly like him.
The date at the top read November 26, 2002.
Mason held the journal and walked to the window. Sunlight spilled through the glass, falling across his hands and the yellowed pages. He drew in a slow breath and turned to the first entry.
November 26, 2002. Morning.
Nathan had written:
Today is my twenty-second birthday.
I did something I had planned for a very long time.
I got married.
Mason’s fingers stopped on that line.
For a moment, he could almost see twenty-two-year-old Nathan sitting at his desk, writing those words with that careful hand. He must have been smiling. Not a loud smile. Nathan was never loud. But the kind of smile a person could not hide when a plan had finally worked.
Chloe still has no idea what happened.
She thinks she was the one who won me over. She thinks I simply said yes to her confession.
She knows nothing.
She does not know I have loved her since I was fourteen.
Mason froze.
Fourteen.
When Nathan was fourteen, Chloe had been sixteen.
He turned the page carefully.
The first time I saw Chloe was in the eighth-grade office.
My mother had taken me to my new school to register. She was afraid I would be bullied. She always worried about that, because I had skipped grades and was younger than the other students in my class.
I stood in the office and listened to her talk with the counselor. I was bored.
Then Chloe came in.
She was carrying a stack of assignment books. She set them on the teacher’s desk and turned to leave, but the teacher called her back.
“Chloe, could you show this new student around?”
She turned around.
Sunlight came through the window behind her and fell over her whole body. Her hair was golden brown, lit bright at the edges. Her eyes were wide and bright, as if someone had filled them with stars. Her face was round, and there was a tiny bead of sweat on the tip of her nose.
She smiled at me and said, “Hey! Come with me.”
In that instant, I heard my own heartbeat.
It sounded like someone knocking on a door.
From that day on, that door never closed again.
Mason lowered the journal onto his lap and stared at the sunlight outside the window.
So Nathan had been waiting for her from that early on.
November 26, 2002. Noon.
This morning, I went to Chloe’s apartment to find her.
She was still sleeping, wrapped in a thin blanket, curled into a ball with only half her head showing. Sunlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and fell across her face.
She looked beautiful asleep.
Like a cat sunning itself.
I called her to wake up. She pretended to sleep through it. I called her several times, and she ignored me every time.
Then she said, “The beautiful princess has been cursed into an enchanted sleep and needs her prince to wake her with a kiss.”
I said, “Her Highness has not brushed her teeth yet.”
She said, “One kiss. It’s in the magic rules.”
So I kissed her several times.
She opened her eyes and said, “I feel like you just washed my face with saliva.”
Then she got up to brush her teeth, wash her face, and change into a red coat. It was the red coat I bought with her at that discount mall. It cost less than twenty dollars, but she looked beautiful in it.
We went to City Hall.
The whole way there, she kept asking, “Shouldn’t we tell our parents first?”
I was a little excited and said, “We’ll make it official first. We can tell them after.”
She looked at me. There was suspicion in her eyes, but more laughter than suspicion.
She said, “Nathan, you’re not marrying me just so you can move in with me, are you?”
I said, “Of course not.”
Actually, she was right.
But I will never admit that.
Never.
Mason let out a soft laugh.
Then, while he was still laughing, his eyes turned red.
He thought of the wedding dress in the walk-in closet of the old house. He thought of Nathan standing before it, brushing his fingertips over the skirt. He thought of Nathan’s voice when he said, “She never had the chance to wear it.”
So that dress had been a promise from twenty-two-year-old Nathan to twenty-two-year-old Chloe.
She just never got the chance to wear it.
November 26, 2002. Afternoon.
After we came out of City Hall, Chloe looked at the marriage certificate in her hand and said, “So that’s it? We’re... married?”
Her expression was very funny.
Like a rabbit tricked into a cage with a carrot.
I said, “Yes. We’re married.”
She glanced at me. “You don’t seem surprised at all.”
“I’m the one who proposed. What am I supposed to be surprised about?”
“When did you propose?”
“Just now.”
“That doesn’t count! You didn’t get down on one knee. No ring. No flowers.”
I took the ring from my pocket and handed it to her.
She froze.
It was a very simple silver band. One line of words had been engraved on it: To the end of time.
She stared at it for a long time.
Then she asked, “When did you have this engraved?”
I said, “When I was nineteen.”
She froze again.
She put the ring on.
It fit perfectly.
She asked, “How did you know my ring size?”
“When you were asleep, I measured it.”
“When?”
“Many times.”
She glared at me like a cat whose fur had exploded.
But her eyes were shining.
I have only ever seen that kind of light in her eyes.
I thought, I want to protect that light.
For my whole life.
Mason closed the journal.
Then he shut his eyes.
He thought of Nathan’s hands.
Those long, elegant hands, carefully wrapping thread around Chloe’s finger while she slept.
He could almost see it.
Nineteen-year-old Nathan, waiting until Chloe fell asleep, looping a piece of thread around her ring finger with impossible care, marking the crossing point with a pen, then removing the thread, measuring the length, and writing it down in a notebook.
He had probably kept that notebook too.
Together with everything else.
Packed away in that cardboard box.
Waiting for the day Chloe came back to see it.
But she never came back.
She would never come back.