The wooden box sat beside us.
Finally, Jeffrey smiled.
“I never officially asked you.”
He glanced down at the ring box.
“Ruth, would nineteen-year-old you have said yes?”
I thought about the girl I had been.
Then I looked at the man sitting beside me.
“Yes.”
He smiled.
“And what about sixty-year-old Ruth?”
I squeezed his hand.
“She’s smarter.”
Jeffrey laughed.
“So that’s a no?”
“No.”
I leaned closer.
“It means she understands that we don’t need another forty years to prove something we already know.”
Jeffrey took out the ring.
Then, forty-one years after he bought it, he slipped it onto my finger.
It fit.
I looked at him.
He rested his head gently against mine.
For most of my life, I believed our story had ended in 1986.
It hadn’t.
We had simply stopped writing it.
Now Jeffrey calls me every morning.
Peter visits often.
