Sebastian asked her to marry him on an ordinary Tuesday evening in late May, in the studio rather than anywhere grand, a choice Wren understood immediately, the moment she walked in and found him waiting there, as the most deliberate decision he'd ever made about the shape of their life together.
She'd left that morning expecting an unremarkable day — a client consultation, an afternoon of careful work on a nineteenth-century portrait that had come in with significant craquelure across the sitter's face, the kind of demanding, absorbing labor that had become, over the past year, her surest anchor back to herself whenever the rest of her life threatened to grow too large to hold steady. She hadn't expected to find Sebastian there when she returned from picking up dinner, standing amid the
