Chapter 33: Fen's Question

He asked her on the flat rock at the river, because of course he did — the place where they had first sat together as something approaching friends, the place that had witnessed the accumulation of everything between them.

It was March. Lena was almost a year old. The river was running high with snowmelt, loud and cold and entirely itself, and the first tentative green was appearing at the edges of the bank where the sun reached longest.

Lena was with Dara. Grace had known something was happening from the specific quality of Fen's morning — not different enough to name, but different enough that her wolf had noticed and paid attention.

They sat on the rock with their boots on because the water was still winter-cold and even meaningful moments had practical limits, and Fen looked at the river for a while in the way he did when he was ordering his thoughts.

Then he turned to her.

'I've been thinking about what I want to ask you,' he said, 'and I've decided to ask it simply because you appreciate simplicity and because anything more elaborate would be performance and I don't want to perform this.'

Grace's heart did something significant. She kept her face composed and attentive.

'I want to build a life with you,' he said. 'Formally. Permanently. With whatever shape that takes in the context of everything that is already real between us.' He reached into his jacket pocket. A ring — simple, silver, with the specific quality of something made rather than bought, the same patient precision that had gone into the carved wooden wolf. 'I made this. I wanted it to be something I made.'

She looked at the ring. At his hands holding it — those steady, capable hands that had held her daughter and covered hers across a table and built things from wood in the patient hours of evenings she hadn't witnessed but whose results she had.

'Fen,' she said.

'You don't have to answer now,' he said. 'I'm not — this isn't pressure. I know where we are and I know the complexity and I know that —'

'Yes,' she said.

He stopped.

'Yes,' she said again. 'I don't need time. I've had a year of time. Yes.'

He looked at her with that expression — the one she kept in her permanent collection, the one that was complete and unguarded and said everything — and then he put the ring on her finger and it fit, because of course it did, because he had made it for her specifically.

She looked at it on her hand. Silver, plain, made with love in the quiet hours of evenings she hadn't seen. Everything that was true about him was in it.

'It's perfect,' she said.

He put his arm around her on the flat rock and she leaned into him and they watched the swollen spring river run past them and said nothing for a long time because nothing was needed.

Eventually Grace said: 'Lena is going to be insufferable about this. She's been trying to engineer this outcome for months. I've seen the way she looks at you.'

'She has excellent judgment,' Fen said.

'She does,' Grace agreed. 'She got it from me.'

He laughed and she felt it through her whole side where she was leaning against him and it was one of the best feelings she had ever had.

They told Lena first. This was agreed without discussion — she was the person who came first, in the ordering of things, and she deserved to know before anyone else. Fen crouched down to her level in the apartment that evening and said: 'Your mother and I are going to get married. Do you approve?'

Lena looked at him with her evaluative seriousness. Then she walked — steady and deliberate on her almost-year-old legs — to him, and put both hands on his face, and said something in her current language that none of them could fully translate but that her expression made entirely clear.

'She approves,' Grace said.

'Clearly,' Fen said, his face in Lena's small hands, his expression the unguarded one.

They told Nolan the following morning. He looked at Grace's hand and then at Fen and then at Grace and said: 'Good,' with the specific warmth of someone who had been watching this develop for a year and was genuinely glad it had arrived.

They told Dara, who made a sound that she converted into decisive action by immediately beginning to plan everything, which Grace had expected and was mostly grateful for.

Grace told Kaden during his Saturday visit, privately, before he went in to see Lena. She told him directly because directness was what she owed him and because she wanted him to hear it from her rather than from the information network that connected Silverbrook's various interested parties.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: 'Is he good to her? To Lena?'

'Yes,' Grace said. 'He's very good to her.'

A pause. 'Then I'm glad,' he said. And she believed him. Not without complexity, not without the specific particular weight of a man understanding the full shape of what he had lost. But genuinely, underneath the complexity, glad.

'Kaden,' she said.

He looked at her.

'Lena knows who you are. She's going to keep knowing. That doesn't change.'

He nodded once. His jaw worked briefly. 'Thank you,' he said.

He went in to see his daughter, and Grace stood in the doorway of the neutral settlement and felt the specific, hard-won peace of someone who has arranged things as honestly and carefully as they can be arranged.

Not perfect. Nothing was perfect.

But right. Everything in its right place.

She went home to Fen.