Viv fell asleep in the backseat while Andre stared out the window with his earbuds in as he listened to an audiobook. I was in the passenger seat beside Harry, and I decided to take the opportunity to discover my man’s expectations for our wedding. We’d gotten engaged over a year ago, but because of the pandemic, we’d had to delay our plans, and now we were having a hard time committing to anything. We couldn’t seem to move forward and had yet to pick a day or a venue or anything, really. I wondered if this was a bad sign, like maybe we didn’t really want to get married.

“What’s your feeling about a castle wedding?” I asked. Might as well jump in with both feet, I figured.

“Depends,” he said. “Do I have to wear a kilt?”

“Do you want to wear a kilt?”

“I don’t think I have the knees for it,” he said.

“You have fine knees,” I countered. “But aren’t you supposed to be Scottish to wear a kilt?”

“I am Scottish as a matter of fact,” he said.

I blinked. “How did I not know this before now?”

“You never asked.”

I wondered what else I had neglected to ask him. Suddenly, I didn’t think we knew each other as well as we should if we were going to get married.

His hand closed over mine on the console between us. His palm was warm, and he gently squeezed my fingers.

“Of course we do,” he said.

“We do what?”

“Know each other well enough to get married,” he said. “That’s what you were thinking, weren’t you?”

“How do you know what I was thinking?” I asked.

“Because I watched you for years just waiting for you to notice me,” he said. “And not in a creepy way, but in a I-have-a-mad-crush-on-this-girl way, and I think I’m pretty good at guessing what you’re thinking after all those years of observation.”

“No doubt,” I said. I stared at him in wonder. It hit me like that sometimes—that this man was going to be my husband. I had no idea how I’d gotten so lucky, but I definitely didn’t want to jinx it.

Our relationship had originally gotten off to a rocky start. When we were kids, terrorizing Notting Hill with our shenanigans in a pack of unruly shopkeepers’ children, I had noticed Harry and considered him a friend but was too busy having crushes on older boys to pay him much attention. After Mim passed away, I didn’t come back to London for years. It was too hard to face the hat shop without her. When I did return at Viv’s insistence, Harry was very suspicious about the sort of person I’d become. That whole viral party-crasher thing certainly didn’t help my image.