“He” is Declan, who showed up on our doorstep a month ago with a small jewelry box and an uncharacteristically anxious demeanor. Fully recovered, he’d flown uninvited across the ocean with the intention of carrying out some kind of grand proposal—a pop-up choir, skywriting across the Atlanta horizon, a banner draped across the entrance to the neighborhood; who knows?—but chickened out. He spent a miserable night in a generic, boxy hotel near the airport, booked a return flight to Spain, canceled it, booked a rideshare to my neighborhood, canceled it, booked another one to my doorstep, walked around the block four times, returned to my house, rang the doorbell, and promptly crumpled to his knees, his head hidden in the crook of his elbow. When I answered the door, I thought it was a ding-dong-ditch until a small squeak sounded and I looked down. Without removing his head from his elbow, Declan proffered the little velvet box in my direction, balanced on the tip of his other, outstretched arm.

“Pleasedon’tsayno,” he mumbled into his arm.

“Declan?”

He looked up with an expression of such comical agony I took a step backward. “I can go,” he said.

“Are you . . . are you asking me to marry you?”

His face retreated back to his elbow. “Yes.”

I sank to my knees, facing him. I inspected the contents of the little box but left it in his hand before reaching my hands to his shoulders. Inch by inch, he raised his head, and we regarded each other’s face; mine no doubt wide-eyed and openmouthed, his now riddled with a few new lines and a bit of a sagging chin but still dominated by those burning, brilliant blue eyes. His face haunted my sleep, nearly as much as Daniel’s.

I remembered the way all the air had left my chest when his sister called and I thought he’d died.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I would love to marry you, Declan.”

He whooped, a long, loud cry of joy and relief, and in his excitement flung the jewelry box into the air. We had to spend a half hour combing through the dirt at the base of my neglected boxwoods before we finally found the ring.

We’re still ironing out the logistics: Where will we live? What will happen with my job?

To my surprise, Rorie favored moving, explaining without a trace of irony that she was done with Atlanta, and anyway, staying too long in one place led to “mental stagnation.” She’d always liked the sound of living in Spain, really, she said.

I brush her hair back from her face, still smiling at the memory. “It’s late, but . . . do you want to go peek in Beau’s room?”

She leaps off my lap. “Yes!”