“Put that away,” Thora says. “You look like a ringmaster in a flea circus.”

He looks down, confused, then laughs. He pockets the ring and comes to her, taking her hands. “Please,” he says. “Help me understand.”

Thora sighs. “How did we meet?”

“You’re telling me you don’t remember?”

“Not every question needs a straight answer, Santi.”

He frowns. “You’re saying there’s something wrong with the way we met?”

“No. I mean—yes. What if Brigitta hadn’t sent my wine to the wrong table? What if she had mixed your drink up with someone else’s instead of mine?”

“Then I’d be proposing to Holger right now.” Thora doesn’t laugh. He stares at her, the beginnings of panic in his eyes. “But she didn’t.”

“Right!” Thora exclaims, like he’s proved her point. “And our whole lives, down to—this,” she says, gesturing hugely at the ring, “hinge on that. Something so stupid, so arbitrary.”

Santi folds his arms. “You know I don’t think it was arbitrary.”

Thora casts her eyes upward. “So you’re proposing to me because you think God wants you to? That just makes it worse. How can you not see how that makes it worse?”

He is unflappable, relentless, a lake that absorbs every stone. “I feel like I’ve spent my life waiting for a sign,” he says. “For something I could be sure of.”

“Please don’t,” Thora says, but he goes on.

“Nothing made sense until you. And then you disappeared, and I—” He laughs, with a desperate edge. “I felt like a crazy person. Being so sure something was right, and then being wrong, I—I felt like God was playing a trick on me.” The fear in his eyes is exactly what Thora has been running from. “You’re afraid because you don’t feel the same,” he says.

“No. I’m afraid because I do.” To his baffled look, she says, “But I don’t think that should be possible! That’s why I don’t trust it.”

“I—” Santi stops. “Let’s forget about fate for a second. Deal?”

She nods. “Deal.”

He comes to her. Sometimes, in their arguments, words no longer reach her: what she needs is his hands, and his attention, and his eyes looking into hers. It slows time to a manageable pace, makes her feel less like a careening top on the verge of falling.

“I am proposing,” he says, “because I love you. I love your mind, I love your body, I love your infuriating skepticism and your need for space. I love the way you throw your head back when you laugh. And I don’t want to ever be without you.”

She blinks. “Right,” she says. “Well, I can certainly get behind that.”