Casey's eyes are bright. Wet. His blue eyes are shimmering under the fluorescent lights, and his jaw is working, and his enormous hands are at his sides and they are steady, because Casey's hands are always steady, and the steadiness of them right now, in contrast to the trembling of mine, is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
“Marry me,” I say. “Not because my mother is watching. Not because an astrologer says our charts align. Not because it is strategically optimal or culturally expected or part of any plan I have ever written in any leather notebook. Marry me because I love you, and because you love me, and because this hospital is where I saw you for the first time, and I want it to be where I ask you for the last time, and I want the answer to be the beginning of something that does not need a plan.”
“Yes.”
He says it before I finish. He says it the way he says everything, without hesitation, without calculation, without the agonized, multi-layered processing that I bring to every decision. He says it the way he said yes in a supply closet, the way he said yes on a terrace, the way he said yes in a hotel room in Jaipur. He says yes like it is the easiest word in the world, like it has been sitting in his mouth for years, waiting.
“Yes,” he says again, and his voice cracks, and his face is doing the crumbling thing, the thing it did in the hotel room when I said “not a lapse in judgment,” except this time it is not crumbling from pain but from joy, and the difference between the two is the difference between breaking and opening, and Casey Welling is opening, right here, on the ER floor, in his dinosaur scrubs, with Dermabond on his arm and tears on his face.
The ER erupts.
It erupts the way only a paediatric ER can erupt, which iswith the chaotic, full-hearted, completely unprofessional enthusiasm of a floor full of people who have, I now realize, been observing this far more closely than I gave them credit for. Casey's face has never been a secret to anyone. And my own behaviour, in retrospect, has been less subtle than I believed at the time. There is no medical justification for a paediatric neurosurgeon to spend as much time on the paediatric ER floor as I have spent on this floor over the past two years. There is no defensible reason for me to consult on cases that did not require neurosurgical input. The scrub tech by the supply station is currently making a gesture at me that I can only describe asI knew it,and the resident I do not recognize has emerged from behind the curtain and is shouting “FINALLY!” with the vindicated fervour of a person who has been carrying a betting slip in her pocket for fourteen months. Nurses are clapping. The mother with the split-lip kid is filming on her phone. Somewhere in the back, I am almost certain I hear money changing hands.
Casey pulls me into him. He pulls me off the ground, actually lifts me, in front of the entire department, and I am in the air and his arms are around me and his face is pressed into my neck and he is laughing and crying and his body is shaking with both and I am holding him with everything I have, my arms around his neck, my face in his hair, and the ring box is still in my hand because I have not actually put the ring on his finger yet, because I am a neurosurgeon who planned a proposal with no plan and forgot the part where the ring goes on the finger.
“The ring,” I say into his hair. “I need to put the ring on.”
“Later,” he says, his voice muffled against my neck. “The ring can wait. This can't.”
He holds me. In the air. In the middle of the ER. In front of everyone. And I let him, because I am done performing, and I am done hiding, and I am done standing behind glass watching the man I love through a window, because there is no glass between us anymore. There never will be again.
He sets me down. I take his hand. I slide the ring onto hisfinger with the steady, precise, surgeon's care that I bring to everything that matters. The platinum catches the light. The gold line glows.
Casey looks at the ring. He looks at me. His blue eyes are red-rimmed and wet and incandescent with a joy so enormous it could power every monitor on this floor.
“Not a lapse in judgment,” he says.
“Not a lapse in judgment,” I confirm.
The ER floor cheers. A child in a nearby bay, who has no idea what is happening, starts clapping because everyone else is clapping, and the sound of a four-year-old's enthusiastic, uninformed applause is the perfect accompaniment to the most important moment of my life.
From the doorway, a voice. Sharp. Theatrical. Trembling with poorly concealed emotion.
“Well,” Gabriel Moretti says, leaning against the doorframe in his bespoke Italian suit with his espresso in his hand and tears streaming down his immaculate face, “it's about bloody time.”
He pushes off the doorframe. He walks toward us. He straightens my lapels with the same fussy, proprietary gesture he used the day he told me I had the bedside manner of a Victorian ghost, and then he turns to Casey and straightens his scrub collar, which does not need straightening, and then he stands back and looks at us both with an expression of such theatrical, smug, deeply genuine pride that it borders on parental.
“Italian catering,” he says, pointing at us with his espresso hand. “Head table. And if either of you gets married without me officiating, I will transfer you both to cardiology and you will spend the rest of your careers examining ventricles and dealing with high-strung drama queens for colleagues.”
“Wouldn't have it any other way,” Casey says.
“Good.” Gabriel takes a sip of his espresso. He nods once, a sharp, final nod, the nod of seven years of investment in his prodigy's happiness finally, spectacularly, returning dividends. Then he turns on his heel and walks back toward the elevator, his leathershoes clicking against the linoleum, and I hear him mutter, just loud enough for us to hear: “I am not crying. This is an allergic reaction to substandard hospital ventilation.”
He is crying. The ventilation is fine.
Casey's hand is in mine. The ring is on his finger. The ER is buzzing with the warm, chaotic energy of a ward that has just witnessed a proposal and is going to be talking about it for roughly the next fifteen years.
I look up at him. He looks down at me. The nine inches of height difference. The fluorescent lights. The dinosaur scrubs and the white coat and the Dermabond and the stickers and the monitors and the antiseptic and the life, the enormous, messy, unpredictable, uncontrollable, beautiful life that we are going to build together in this hospital and in this city and in a cluttered apartment with a goldendoodle.
“Hey, Doc?” Casey says.
“Yes?”
“You're going to have to call your mother.”
The warm glow in my chest dims by at least three degrees. “I am aware.”
“And she's going to want to plan the wedding.”