“I didn’t know then that hell would be in the littlest things—in meeting a perfectly lovely person and having my heart yearn for you, in touching someone else and wanting to feel you. My heart held you up like a mirror, a line on a wall where the height of my feelings would never again be as tall. It might have been easier without the intermittent normalcy between the blasts of memory, where your voice, your taste was so vivid it undid everything. After all those years of forcing myself not to give in to the yearning to search for you, it was the best thing I ever did, because it led me back to you, back to the me I had lost. I don’t know how to be me without you.

“Ash, meu amor, will you please put me out of my misery and let me spend the rest of my life with you?”

“That was long,” Ashna said through a sniffle. “And beautiful.”

“I wrote it when you left this morning. On the hotel notepad.” He pointed at the desk. “I thought I’d bring it to you, an old-fashioned letter. Then I read it so many times I knew it by heart, and I heard my mãe’s voice telling me I couldn’t say those things without a ring. I knew rings make you uncomfortable, but I did want to honor my mãe and get you something. Good thing Song’s sister knows a jeweler.”

This time he wiped her cheek.

She took the ruby out of the box. It was a pendant on a chain. Rising to her feet, she helped him up. “It’s not something, Rico. It’s everything.”

“Turn it around.”

On the back was engraved #Ashico.

She was laugh-crying so hard she could barely speak. “Will you put it on me?”

They walked to the mirror in the alcove, where he had shown her what it meant to be beautiful. There again in his eyes was the only thing that made anyone truly beautiful. Love.

Slipping her hair onto one shoulder, he hooked it around her neck. A chain that didn’t feel like a chain but a lifeline. Then he kissed her neck, eyes locked with hers in the mirror.

“Thank you for finding me again.” She leaned into his kiss, took his hand and pressed it against her full heart. “Happiness seeps into me when you’re around, Rico. Without invitation, without notice, joy finds me. Being around you is being alive, it’s breathing, it’s home.”

Then she let him lift her up and place her on the table against the mirror, and she was reminded again exactly how loud the love of her life could be.

Chapter Thirty-Five