When We Let Go, Delancey Stewart [early reader books .txt] 📗

Connor was still grinning, though he looked uncomfortable and nervous.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why isn’t he saying anything?” I asked my brother, nodding at Connor, who still hadn’t moved.

“I think he’s nervous.” Cam pounded Connor’s shoulder with his fist in a playful punch. “Hey man, wasn’t there something you wanted to, uh, say?”

Connor snapped out of whatever spell he’d been under. “I made your favorite dinner,” he said.

“Chicken piccata,” I said. “It smells amazing.”

Cam was popping a bottle of champagne in the kitchen, and pouring three glasses.

“Champagne?” I shook my head in wonder, grinning along with the boys and their happy surprise. “I guess we should celebrate the house finally being done.”

“Among other things,” Cam said.

“Like what?” I asked. Connor seemed to have gone catatonic again.

“Connor, c’mon, man.” Cam put a glass on the table in front of Connor. “Can we get this over with so we can eat? I can’t handle you being this fruity all night.”

I looked back and forth between them, getting a small idea what was going on. But until Connor spoke, I couldn’t be sure.

He took a deep breath and then stepped around the table, dropping to a knee in front of me.

“Oh my God,” I said, clapping a hand over my mouth.

“Maddie,” Connor said finally. “I’ve spent my life believing that I saved you that day. I thought that when I’d pulled you from the river, and put you down right on this very spot, that I’d saved your life.”

“You did,” I whispered. The room had disappeared, and all I saw were Connor’s bright eyes, his perfect lips.

He shook his head. “No, not really. I mean, yes, maybe I did. But in the past year, I’ve come to realize something else. All those years I spent, all the time I searched for meaning in my life, I think I was really looking for you. And it wasn’t because you were the one I saved. It was because I needed you to save me. And you have.”

I felt tears building in my eyes. They weren’t the forced tears I’d squeezed out when Jack had proposed because I’d thought I was supposed to cry. They were tears of genuine wonder that this incredible man was on his knees before me, saying the words that I’d only ever want to hear from his lips. They were tears of realization that this was right.

“Maddie Turner, will you marry me?”

I felt myself nodding and dropped to my knees facing him, and pulled him into a kiss that made the room spin.

When I pulled away, I heard clapping, and remembered that my brother had been standing there the whole time, witnessing this moment. I hugged Connor again. “Yes, of course I will!”

I got to my feet and stepped around the table to Cameron. I was worried that it might have hurt him watching that, being forced to witness someone else’s happiness so intimately while his heart was surely still in pieces.

Unshed tears shone in Cam’s eyes, but there was something else in them, too—the light that had been missing this past year. The gleam that I remembered from childhood. I reached for him, and his arms went tight around me.

“I’m so happy for you, Mad,” he said. “Congratulations!” He broke away and raised his glass, handing me mine as Connor retrieved his.

I’d been worried that my happiness might hurt my brother, but now I saw that having him there in that moment with me was perfect. As screwed up and imperfect as my world usually was and would certainly be again, it was perfect in that moment, with my brother at my side as I began the next chapter of my life.

I smiled at the men I loved more than anything else in the world and let the tiny bubbles in the champagne fizz on my tongue as I basked, glowing, in that single moment of perfection. Maybe Connor was right, that the little in between moments were the ones we needed to really focus on living, but this big single moment would live in my mind and heart forever. In this moment, as the pieces of my life solidified, I realized that I’d managed to rebuild it—my life, my love, my family. I sipped champagne and smiled in wonder that it was even possible. And as Connor and Cameron smiled back at me, I knew I’d finally found the place where I belonged.

I would never leave Kings Grove. It was where I’d been happiest as a child, and though I’d spent most of the last couple years trying to escape it, it was the place I’d rediscovered myself as an adult. Kings Grove was home, and I was finally the woman I was meant to be.