The Door I Locked

Chapter seventeen continues

I was wrong about that, it turns out. Not about the hurt — that was real, and I don't regret a single year I spent building a life strong enough to survive it. But about the door. Some doors, I've learned, don't have to stay locked forever to have been right to lock in the first place. Sometimes you get to choose, on your own terms, in your own time, exactly who gets to knock again — and exactly what you're going to say, this time, when they do.

He asked me to marry him two years later, on the same rooftop we'd technically never been allowed on, which had since been converted, absurdly, into a rooftop restaurant neither of us had any right sentimentalizing. I laughed when I understood what he was doing, half exasperated, half undone completely.

"You're being dramatic," I told him, echoing myself at twenty, the whole weight of everything we'd survived folded into the joke.

"Maybe," he said. "But I still think it's true."

This time, I didn't just take his hand and let the silence answer for me.

This time, I said yes out loud.

I can't can't describe how happy i was i was waiting for this so long and it's happening.