She ripped that one open as she reached her floor. Drake had been writing to her nearly every day since he’d been sent back to Spain, but rarely did the letters reach her one at a time. They tended to arrive in weekly batches, and she’d just had a batch two days ago.

But she wasn’t about to complain about an extra. She pulled out the sheet, grinning when she saw the paper wasn’t filled with words, but with numbers. Lowering the page, she caught sight of the decidedly book-shaped parcel waiting at her door.

A moment later, she’d juggled the brolly, the book, and her other post through the door and into their respective places. She unpinned her hat, shrugged out of her coat, and smoothed a hand over the cardigan Maman had given her.

Then she unwrapped the package and grinned. Don Quixote, as he’d promised.

He probably wouldn’t say anything in this coded letter that he didn’t say, now, in his normal ones. And she’d rather gotten the hang of writing sweet letters back too. She hoped, anyway. She tried. Perhaps her lines were filled more with mathematics than with poetry, but it was all the same thing in the end, wasn’t it?

Though she hadn’t yet mustered the courage to say what she knew she would when next she saw him face-to-face. That God had shown her, these last few months, that He could be trusted. Not just with her well-being, but with her dreams. She could trust that He had given her this love for Drake for His own purpose, but that it didn’t negate the other gifts He’d breathed into her. Loving him didn’t mean losing herself. Marrying him someday, creating a family with him, didn’t have to mean forsaking her dreams. Somehow, He could make possible what the world said wasn’t. Somehow, he would fill her with the love a family would demand—as He always had, for her parents and Lukas and Willa, for Willa’s family and little Zurie.

Deciding that tea and a bath could wait, she grabbed paper and a pencil and then sat down with the book. It didn’t take long for the message to take shape. It started out as they usually did, lovely and sure to haunt her. But it was the ending that made her pause and read it again, and then a third time.

I want forever with you. I will wait a year, a decade, a century to make you my wife. But tell me you’ll take me someday, my love. Tell me that the promise of forever can begin now.

She let the pencil clatter to the table and leaned back in her chair, holding the page before her.

“Well? I can wait for an answer, too, but I do have this ring my grandfather gave me. . . .”