Page 46 of Savage Ranger Daddy

I cross the room and he pulls out my chair, which he has never done in six weeks of meals at this table. I sit. He serves dinner: roasted chicken, potatoes, greens from the cooler that Harper must have sent along with the candles. It's good. Better than good. He's been practicing when I wasn't paying attention.

We eat. We talk about the article. He asks me about Cal Hutchins and I tell him about the nurse's report, about Cal holding the article and not letting go. We talk about Katya, who's been in contact with the FBI's trafficking task force and has identified two additional locations from memory. We talk about Megan, who texted me yesterday with a photograph of her new apartment and a line that said "first place that's ever been just mine."

We talk about the case. Dale Weathers is awaiting trial on seventeen federal counts. Alice Dermott pleaded guilty to conspiracy and is cooperating. Commissioner Tate flipped within forty-eight hours and gave up every name, date, and dollar he could remember. Jeffrey Pruitt was arrested three weeks ago at a motel in Wyoming after a tip from a gas station attendant who recognized his photo from the news. He's not cooperating. He doesn't need to. The evidence is overwhelming.

"Mason called today," Brock says, setting down his fork. "Fourteen women have been recovered across three states based on the intelligence from the original raid and the subsequent investigation. Fourteen."

I set down my own fork. Fourteen women. Alive. Found. Because of an article I almost didn't publish, and a game warden who gave me coordinates before someone tried to silence him, and a marshal who showed up at a diner and said "pack a bag."

"That's the number that matters," I say quietly.

"Yeah." He looks at me across the table in the candlelight. "It is."

We finish dinner. I stand to clear the plates and he catches my wrist. Not hard. Just enough to stop me.

"Leave them."

"Since when do you leave dishes?"

"Since right now." He stands and leads me to the couch. The fire is burning steady, casting warm light across the log walls. Outside the windows the sky is darkening toward the particular shade of deep blue that only happens in the mountains, when the sun drops behind the peaks and the stars start to appear one at a time like someone is turning on lights in an empty house.

We sit. He pulls me against his side the same way he did that first night, when I was too scared to sleep and he was too stubborn to admit he wanted to hold me. His arm settles around my shoulders. My head finds the spot on his chest where I can hear his heartbeat.

"I told you at the clearing that I had something to say," he says. "Something that wasn't for a crime scene."

My heart does something complicated. "I remember."

"I'm not good at this. You know that. I'm good at perimeters and weapons checks and driving mountain roads in the dark. I'm good at lists of things to do instead of feeling what I feel. I'm not good at saying what you deserve to hear."

"You're doing fine so far."

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small object that catches the firelight. It's not a box. It's a ring, held between his thumb and forefinger, simple and unadorned. A band of pale metal that looks like it was made by hand.

"Rafe made it," he says. "I asked him to. From a piece of the cabin's original foundation pine, preserved in resin and set in titanium. It's the only material I could think of that meant something real."

I stare at the ring. A piece of this cabin. The place where I was scared and brave and fell in love and broke out of a shipping container and wrote the most important story of my life.

"I love you, Hazel." His voice is low and steady, the same voice that told me to get in the truck, that said "I've got you" when I was crying in the dark, that whispered "postponed, not cancelled" against my mouth while a storm raged outside. "I'veloved you since you waved at me in a parking lot during a federal extraction. I loved you when you stole my list and memorized every word of it. I loved you when you crawled through a drainage channel with a phone wrapped in a blanket because you refused to be someone else's cargo. I want to love you for the rest of my life, in this cabin, in these mountains, wherever the next story takes you. Marry me."

I don't cry. I thought I would. I've imagined this moment in various embarrassing ways over the past six weeks, most of them involving ugly crying and mascara rivers and Brock looking alarmed. But when it actually happens, when the words land and the ring catches the firelight and his gray eyes hold mine with that particular intensity that still makes my breath catch after all this time, I don't cry.

I smile. The real one. Not the bright deflecting smile I use to hide fear or the tough-journalist smile I use in interviews. The one that's just mine, the one that only comes out when something is so exactly right that my face can't help itself.

"Yes," I say. "Obviously yes. Did you really think there was a universe where I said no? I broke out of a shipping container for you. A shipping container, Brock. With a bobby pin. If that doesn't say 'forever' I don't know what does."

He slides the ring onto my finger. It fits. Of course it fits. He probably measured my hand while I was sleeping because that's exactly the kind of thing he would do and never tell me about.

I hold my hand up to the firelight and watch the cabin's foundation pine glow inside the resin, a small piece of our beginning captured in something permanent.

He kisses me. Long and slow and thorough, the kind of kiss that says everything his speech already said and a few things it didn't. When we pull apart I'm in his lap on the couch and his hand is in my hair and the fire is popping and the night outside is full of stars.

"I need to tell you something," I say, still close enough that our foreheads are touching.

"Yeah?"

"I finished the article tonight. The whole thing. Twenty-three pages. It's going to run as a three-part series in the Washington Post next month."

His eyes widen. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to see the pride move through them before he controls it. "The Post."