Ruth answered on the second ring, her voice carrying the particular alertness of a woman who kept her phone close even at eleven at night, and Wren, sitting cross-legged on her studio floor with Sebastian beside her, found herself suddenly nervous in a way the proposal itself hadn't managed to produce.
"He asked me to marry him," Wren said, before Ruth could get further than a greeting. "With your ring. I wanted you to hear it from me before anyone else, and I wanted to thank you properly, because I don't think I fully understood, until I was looking at it on my own hand, what it actually meant that you said yes to him."
There was a pause on the line, and when Ruth spoke again, her voice had thickened considerably. "I've been waiting for this call since Sebastian first asked me about the
