Page 25 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

It's an old ring. Gold gone soft and warm at the edges, one stone, set low.

Last November, a woman came into the café with a new engagement ring and put her hand out across the counter for inspection, and Delilah made all the correct noises and then said, after the woman had gone, that whatever anyone gave her it had better sit flat, because half the rings she'd ever admired would be full of dough inside a week. She was refilling the sugar while she said it. I doubt she even remembers saying it.

Delilah is standing at the gravel lot by the main entrance at ten to eight in her yellow reflective jacket, doing the thing where she stretches one heel up behind her against the railing and loses her balance and pretends she meant to.

She looks at my feet for a long moment.

"Those are new," she observes, trying for casual but still sounding surprised.

"They are."

The light is going gold and long over the water, and the path is damp from the afternoon. I follow her down onto it and she sets a pace that is entirely conversational. Which is the point. She talks for the whole of the first half mile, about a hundred and forty cinnamon buns, Bill's opinion on the new bins by the bandstand, and Lucifer having discovered the top of the pastry case and what this means for civilization.

I know every yard of this path. I know it in the dark. I have stood in that gravel lot in November rain and January fog and told myself a great many sensible things about security, and the truth is I have known her routine for six months and this is the first time I have been on it beside her.

We come past the boat sheds and the path bends left into the stretch where the lamps give out for eleven yards..

At the bandstand she slows to a walk with her hands on her head, breathing hard, and drops onto the bench facing the water with her jacket unzipped and her hair coming down in silky tendrils.

"Okay," she says. "Be honest. On a scale of one to ten, how much did you hate that."

"Four."

"Four?"

"It's a low four." I sit down next to her. The water has gone the color of an old coin, and somewhere out past the boat sheds a dog is being called.

"I've spent six months in that parking lot," I tell her.

She goes quiet.

"Every night you've come out here I've been sitting in the dark at that gate, and I told Eduard it was security, and I told myself it was security, and it was. All of it was true." I look at the path where it comes down off Merrow Street. "It was also the onlyforty minutes of my day I looked forward to. I'd wait for the gate to bang and then I'd sit there and listen to you go past and I'd go home, and that was the whole of it, and I would have gone on doing it forever."

She smiles softly, and shakes her head, unsure of where this is going.

"You have a café full of people who love you and a friend who'd fight anyone in this town for you, and I have a life I'm not going to bring through your front door. I've thought about that more than you know. And I've come to the conclusion that keeping you at a distance was never protecting you, it was just the version I could manage on my own."

The dog is still ignoring whoever is calling it.

I take the box out of my jacket and open it on my knee, and she stops breathing altogether.

"I don't want to be the man in the parking lot," I say. "I want to be the one you come home to. Marry me, Delilah."

For a moment she does absolutely nothing, and I get a very clear look at the inside of my own chest.

Then her hand comes up over her mouth and she makes a sound that is half laugh and she says, "It sits flat."

"It sits flat."

"How did you know?" she asks as I pull it from the little padded cushion.

"I heard you tell the sugar jar."

"You were in the corner," she repeats, and then she's crying properly, and laughing, and hitting me once on the shoulder with the flat of her hand, which I take to be a good sign. "Yes. Obviously, yes."

I get the ring onto her finger with the last of the light going off the water, and she looks at it for about two seconds before shehas her arms around my neck and her cold nose against my jaw. I hold on to her on a park bench in front of the boat sheds and a dog with no interest in authority.

"Everyone is going to be unbearable," she says into my collar.