Patricia called me two days later, which I hadn’t expected.
She was pleasant, even warm, in the way that made me wonder if James had actually said something. She asked how I was sleeping. She asked about my family, whether my parents were still in the picture, whether I’d grown up in the city. She asked what my father had done for work.
I answered simply: parents gone, not a city kid originally, father was in finance, retired early.
There was a pause on her end that lasted just a beat too long.
“Finance,” she said. “What kind?”
“Investment management, mostly.”
“And he did well at it?”
I told her he’d done fine. Which was technically true. My father had done considerably better than fine, but that wasn’t Patricia’s business, and I had reasons, old and practiced, for not volunteering it.
She asked two more questions. What I’d studied in school. Whether I had siblings. Each answer led to another question, the whole conversation arranged like a staircase descending toward something I couldn’t quite see the bottom of.
By the time I hung up, I had stopped thinking of it as small talk.
She wasn’t asking about me. She was building a file.
The proposal happened three weeks later, over pasta at a restaurant he’d chosen and reserved without asking my preference. Not a complaint, exactly. James liked to plan things. I’d always read it as confidence.
He went down on one knee between the appetizer and the main course. The table next to ours started clapping before I’d said anything. The waiter materialized with a champagne flute. The ring was large and clearly expensive, which I noted and then set aside.
I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was in love with him, or I believed I was, which at that point amounted to the same thing.
What I remember most from that night is not the proposal itself. It’s what came after, once we were back at his apartment with the champagne half-finished and the ring still feeling foreign on my hand.
He started talking about the wedding. Not asking. Talking. As though the plans had been waiting behind a door he’d finally been given permission to open.
“Tuscany,” he said. “Or the Amalfi coast. Somewhere with real history.” He refilled my glass without looking at me. “We’d need to book at least eighteen months out for somewhere decent. Do you have any idea what those venues cost?”
I did not mention that I had, in fact, a very precise idea.
“And the honeymoon should be at least three weeks. Japan, maybe, or the Maldives. Somewhere we actually decompress.”
I watched him. The way his hands moved when he talked about it — loose, expansive, like a man spending money he already had. There was a spreadsheet quality to his excitement that I couldn’t quite name at the time. He wasn’t romanticizing the wedding. He was budgeting it.
“A lot of couples do smaller ceremonies,” I said.
He looked at me with something I can only describe as patient disappointment. “Emma. We get married once.”
I let it go. I told myself it was enthusiasm. New-engagement energy. The ring was still warm from his pocket.
But I remembered it later, when everything else made sense.
