Page 95 of Colt
I looked at her for a moment.
Then I slid off the couch and onto one knee on Betty’s living room floor.
She blinked. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
“We’re in Betty’s living room.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have a ring.”
“Didn’t have one the first time either.” I took her hand. It was warm and steady in mine. “Lil, baby. Lilac. Will you marry me?”
She stared at me. Then she laughed—soft and helpless—and leaned forward and kissed me once, hard.
“Yes,” she said against my mouth. “Obviously yes.”
?
We told the boys at breakfast.
Knox went fully sideways—jumping down from his chair, spinning in a circle, shouting about whether there would be space for a dog and could he have a blue room. Lilac said his name twice before he slowed down enough to hear that the dog was amaybe.
Luca didn’t move. He sat very still with his cereal spoon halfway to his mouth, watching me the way he always did when he was deciding whether something was real.
“We’d really live with you?” he said. “All the time?”
“All the time,” I said. “Your own rooms. Your own space. But together.”
He thought about it. “What about Grandma Betty?”
Betty was already in the kitchen doorway, dish towel in hand, not pretending she wasn’t listening. When Luca looked at her, her eyes were bright.
“Try and stop me,” she said.
Knox yelled something triumphant and knocked over his orange juice. Luca set his spoon down carefully, slid off his chair, and walked across to me. He didn’t say anything. He just put his arms around my neck and held on, and I held him back with both hands and didn’t trust myself to speak.
?
My family moved in three weeks later.
Dutch showed up first thing with a truck and Holden and Handful, and then the rest of the brothers filtered in through the morning until Betty’s front yard looked like a full club muster. Lilac stood in the middle of it looking slightly overwhelmed—a dozen bikers in cuts, hauling furniture with the same intensity they brought to everything else—and then Indira appeared at her elbow with two coffees and said something that made her laugh, and after that she was fine.
It took most of the day.
Knox supervised his room with tremendous authority. He stood in the doorway directing where each piece of furniture should go, changed his mind twice about the bed placement, and asked Handful four separate times whether he thought blue was the right color. Handful, who had the patience of a saint when it came to the boys, told him it was definitely the right color and then distracted him with new card tricks.
Luca was quieter about it. He carried his own boxes in from the truck, one at a time, arranged his books himself in an orderonly he understood. When he was done, he sat on his new bed and looked around the room for a long moment, then came to find me in the hall.
“I like it,” he said.
Coming from Luca, that was a full endorsement.
By mid-afternoon the heavy work was done. I found Lilac in the kitchen with Indira, unpacking boxes, and I stood in the hallway for a minute just watching her—opening cabinets, figuring out where things went, making the space hers.
She caught me looking. “What?”
