CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The grass was spongy under his feet, and the early evening sun cast golden shadows across the headstones.

The oaks and elms rose stately and green, their lush leaves forming canopies. Flowers burst to life everywhere, some wild, many in bouquets laid on the ground. It was an odd juxtaposition—all that verdant life in the midst of those markers of death. But that was what cemeteries were for—for the living to remember the dead. With her hand in his, they neared her father’s grave.

As the simple stone came into view, he saw yellow. So much yellow.

“My grandma was here this week. She brought those,” Shannon said gesturing to the sunflowers along the headstone.

He read the etching. Thomas Darren Paige. Loving father. His throat hitched, and he swallowed it away as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

“I bring them here, too,” she continued.

“They’re beautiful,” Brent said softly, as they stopped a few feet from the grave. “It’s a beautiful way to remember him.”

“They’re not only for him,” Shannon said, looking up, meeting his eyes.

“Who are they for?” he asked, but he knew the answer. In a flash, everything made sense. He inhaled sharply, walloped once again by something unexpected.

“I like to think he’s with my dad. Somehow. That my dad is looking out for him. That they keep each other company in the great beyond.”

He swallowed roughly, and spoke softly. “I believe that.”

“I started to bring the flowers when I came back from London. I was struggling and I needed to find a way through all that sadness. I’d been pregnant and utterly confused, and then in mere hours, I became not pregnant and completely empty. I wasn’t just sad. I was hollow, and aching. I felt the loss every day for the first few months. I felt it like it was this hole inside me. I didn’t know what to do,” she said, holding her hands out wide, showing the helplessness she must have felt. “I talked to my grandma about it, and it’s not as if I was trying to compare what I lost to what she lost—she lost a son she’d raised and loved for thirty-six years. I lost a son I never knew. But she told me that remembering the person who was no longer here was what helped her the most to heal,” Shannon said. Huge tears welled up in her green eyes, and he couldn’t help himself. He bent his head to hers and kissed them away.

“And so I did the same,” she said, sharing more of the story. “I thought it would just help me deal with the initial awfulness. That kind of grief upends your daily routine. It makes it hard to get out of bed. This helped though,” she said, and her voice was soft, but steady. He could hear her strength in it. He could sense all her resilience, all her survival. “And soon, the pain lessened. Time did what time is supposed to do. The pain didn’t feel so raw or so new or so fresh anymore. I was able to do my job, and live my life, and not be seized with sadness every second. But I’d still come here when I was in town, and I’d leave more sunflowers, and soon I realized I wasn’t leaving them for the baby anymore.”

“You weren’t?”

She shook her head. “They were for you,” she said, and a new shock reverberated in his system. But it wasn’t the horribleness of last night; it was something else. It was shock mixed with a strange sense of hope. “They reminded me of you and how I felt for you. I was leaving them here as a way to remember that I wasn’t alone. That even though you didn’t know, you were a part of it, too. Sunflowers always reminded me of you.”

“Why?” he said, his throat dry as the desert, choked with emotion.

She didn’t answer with words at first. She answered through touch. She pushed up the sleeve on his right arm, revealing his ink—the black sunburst he’d had done with her in Boston, when she’d told him it fit his sunny disposition. “Because you were like the sun to me. You made my days better. You were my warmth and my happiness. And I wanted to remember that the baby was as much you as he was me. That we were in it together, even if we weren’t together.”

His heart stopped. His breath fled his chest. His life narrowed to a before and an after. To that moment in time. It marked the man he was, and the man he was becoming. The man he could be for her. That second, those words became the epicenter of his life. “I never knew how far and deep it went when you said I was like the sun to you.”

She ran her fingertip over his sunburst, her touch electrifying him, even in the intensity of this kind of admission. “You were all my sunny days, Brent. You were always so happy, and so upbeat, and you never let anything get you down. And you gave all that to me. You turned my days around when I met you.”

He closed his eyes and swayed closer to her, trying to take that all in, to digest the enormity of what she was saying. Of how she’d never let go of him through all the years. Of how she’d included him in her life, the good and the bad, even when he’d had no clue where she was and vice versa.

“I thought you hated me,” he said softly, trying to process this.

She shrugged, happily. “I thought I did, too. But I never stopped loving you.”

“I never stopped either. Not once. Not once through all the years.”

Then it hit him, with the clarity of a thousand suns. There was life and death, and the thinnest thread separated the two, by the edge of a razor. Life was for the living, and for the loving.

He dropped down to one knee for the second time ever. He had no ring. No plan. No speech. He grasped her hand in his. “Marry me.”

She blinked, a look of utter disbelief on her face. “Are you proposing to me in a cemetery?”

“I am,” he said. Hoping. Praying. Wanting that yes.

“You’re crazy,” she said, but she was grinning wildly.

“Am I?”

“You might be. You did put your phone in a dishwasher. Was it dirty?”

“Yes. It was full of my filthy, dirty messages to you. It was about to combust from the hotness.”

She laughed loudly, clasping her free hand on her belly. “Brent, you’re ridiculous.”

“And that’s what you always say when I make you laugh. You say I’m ridiculous. That’s another reason why you should marry me now. Because I make you laugh, and I always will. Because I make you happy, and I promise to make that my greatest mission for the rest of my life. Because you make me so damn happy. Loving you is the best thing I’ve ever done. I love everything about you—your body, your heart, and your mind. I have been in love with you for more than a decade and I’ve barely spent any of those years with you. Let’s pick up where we left off and spend our whole lives together. Let's do what we were supposed to do ten years ago. Let's do it now.”

“Now?”

His eyes lit up with mischief. “Vegas, baby.”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Think about it,” he urged. “Everyone comes here to get married. We live here. This is our town, babe. This is our place. Let’s make it ours.”

She held out her hand and tugged him up. “Vegas, baby.”