ARIA

A long quiet moment passed between us.

"You’re welcome," he said finally, in a voice that was slightly less formal than usual and somehow more real for it.

"Good," I said. "Now close the laptop and rest. You’re terrible at it."

He almost smiled. Actually almost.

A few days passed.

Then I was discharged.

I had assumed we were going back to the hotel. Packed my few things, said my goodbyes to the nurses who had been very patient with both me and Kael for the past several days, and walked out to the car with Kael’s hand resting on my back.

We didn’t go to the hotel.

He drove for about twenty minutes through parts of the city I didn’t know particularly well, and then we turned through a gate and up a long driveway and stopped in front of a house I instantly recognized.

I stared at it.

It was large. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it was already completely finished, not the way I saw it the last time, but lived in ready, furnished, decorated, every light on inside like it had been waiting for us specifically.

Like someone had decided, in the middle of everything falling apart, to quietly go ahead and build the rest of our life.

I turned to look at him.

He was watching me with that careful expression he got when he wanted to know what I thought but wasn’t going to ask directly.

"You already bought the house," I said.

"Yes."

"And furnished it."

"Yes."

"While everything was happening."

"There were people handling it."

I looked back at the house. It must be genuinely something to be this rich, I thought. To be able to say there were people handling it about something like this and mean it completely.

"This is the surprise," I said. "From the hospital."

"Yes."

I got out of the car.

We walked through it together, room by room, and with every room I fell a little more in love with it in that helpless way you fall in love with things that are exactly right.

The ceilings were high and the windows were large and the light came in at angles that made everything look warm even when it was just furniture and walls.

It was expensive in a way that you could feel in the air, not showily, just thoroughly. Every surface, every choice, every detail was done with the kind of money that doesn’t need to announce itself.

We reached the kitchen last.

It was enormous. A long marble counter ran along one side and the whole space opened up in a way that made it feel less like a room and more like somewhere you would actually want to spend time.

I stood in the middle of it and looked around and felt something settle in me that I hadn’t expected.

"Is it to your taste?" Kael asked from behind me.

I turned. "I love it. I’m going to add some things."

"Obviously."

"But I love it." I looked at him. "I can already picture our baby here."

I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, exactly. It just came. The image of it, our child toddling around this kitchen, this house, growing up in rooms with high ceilings and good light with both of us here.

Something moved across Kael’s face. Quiet and warm and entirely unguarded for exactly one second.

Then he crossed the room, put his hands on my waist, and lifted me onto the counter like it was a completely normal thing to do.

I held his face and kissed him.

"I love it," I said again, against his mouth.

He kissed me back.

I pulled away just slightly. "A little birdie told me," I said, keeping my voice low, "that you’ve been visiting your father. Two days in a row now, apparently."

He looked at me. His eyes dropped briefly to my lips, then back up.

"I couldn’t ignore the advice of such a wise woman," he said. The way he said it... like I carried some old, rare, hard-earned kind of wisdom that he had decided to trust. Like it wasn’t a compliment so much as just a fact he had accepted.

I liked that more than I would ever tell him.

He went back to kissing me before I could say anything about it, his hands moving to my waist, then lower, and then he was lifting me off the counter entirely.

"Come and see the bedroom," he said.

"I literally just got out of the hospital."

"I’m aware."

I laughed, and he carried me, and I didn’t argue.

The bedroom was ridiculous. I say that with complete affection. It was large and soft and decorated in a way that managed to be both expensive and actually livable, which is harder than it sounds.

I stood in the middle of it in my discharge clothes and turned slowly and felt like a person who had somehow ended up inside a dream that belonged to a better version of themselves.

Kael was watching me again.

"The surprise isn’t finished," he said.

He went to the wardrobe and came back with a box. Small, flat, wrapped simply.

Inside was a dress.

I lifted it out carefully. The fabric was the kind that felt like water in your hands, a deep, rich color that I would not have picked for myself but immediately understood was exactly right. I looked at it for a long moment.

"Go try it on," he said.

I did.

When I came back out and saw his face, I stopped in the doorway.

He looked at me the way he sometimes looked at me when he thought I wasn’t paying full attention. Like I was something he still couldn’t quite believe was real and had quietly decided not to take for granted.

"Do you like it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said simply. "I love it. I love you."

...

Later that evening, I came downstairs.

The house was different.

The lights were low and warm. Candles on the table, actual candles, not many, just enough.

A dinner set for two, everything already placed, something that smelled extraordinary coming from somewhere I hadn’t investigated yet. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

A few soft balloons near the far wall, white and simple. Music playing from somewhere, low enough to be felt more than heard.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and took all of it in.

Then I saw him.

Kael, in the middle of the room, down on one knee, a small box open in his hand.