(Kaelen)
We're still in the garden when I ask it.
The gold has gone to gray and the bench is cold through my clothes but neither of us has moved — him on his knees in the grass, my hand on his face, his hand over mine. The silence has been the comfortable kind, the kind we've been building for months, but underneath it the question is still there.
"How long," I say. "Exactly."
He turns his face slightly into my palm. Not avoiding — thinking. Finding the accurate version, the way he always does.
"Three years," he says.
I knew that. He's told me that. But there's something in his voice that means he's not finished.
"There was a specific day," he says. "Not the summit with the green dress. Before that."
I look at him. "What day."
He looks at the garden. Then back at me.
"A pack bord
