Ever have that moment where you think you might be gaining some ground, only to realize the ground you've gained is at the end of a cliff and it's crumbling beneath your feet?
I swear my heart and lungs seized when Abigail told me she'd seen the video of my fucking proposal to Charlotte. Knowing that she'd seen it and not just heard about it...well, that must have seemed like a knife being stabbed into her when I'd proposed to her.
The whole production had been orchestrated by my mother and the week leading up to it had been a fucking nightmare that I never wanted to repeat.
"How can you say you didn't have anything to do with that proposal? You set up the whole thing!"
"I'll repeat: I didn't have one damn thing to do with that proposal."
"So that wasn't you telling her how much you loved her and asking her to marry you? Someone else who looks just like you did the actual proposing?"
I grabbed her hand and guided Abigail toward the couch. "This is going to take a while, so let's sit down."
Once we were seated, facing toward each other with our knees almost touching, I looked at her. Her face so adorable right then, so confused and curious, not knowing what she was going to hear. Not knowing everything she'd been told and everything she believed about that proposal was a lie. "So you saw the entire video, right?"
"Yes," she said.
"Well, it's true that our family and friends were there, hidden close to the spot where I proposed. But that was my mother's and Charlotte's mother's doing, not mine. Charlotte's mother picked the spot -- it was the same bench that Charlotte's father had proposed to her on. She thought it would be romantic for Charlotte to get engaged on the same bench on the same pier that she had gotten engaged on, exactly twenty-six years earlier."
"It was the same day?"
"Yes, so things had to move fast to make it by the deadline."
"You had a deadline for getting engaged?" Abigail's voice was rising as if she couldn't believe that. I hadn't been able to believe it either, at the time.
"I did, but it was more important to hit the date Charlotte's parents actually got married, which was six weeks after the proposal. Her parents got married a year and six weeks after their engagement, but we didn't have that long to wait."
"Was she pregnant?"
I shook my head, trying not to shudder at the thought.
"But I heard you telling her how much you loved her. How do you explain that? Those words had to have been yours, at least."
I barked out a sharp burst of laughter. "The audio wasn't great because of the noise. And my sister must not have known. She was never great at her literature and poetry classes. That flowery bullshit I was spouting was an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem -- How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways. Charlotte's favorite poem that I memorized for the proposal because her mother said it was Charlotte's dream to have that quoted to her when she got engaged. I was just fucking happy it wasn't a long poem."
"Well, I know you chased all around town to find the perfect ring for her. So you did take part in that."
I laughed grimly. "Not by choice. Our mothers sent me on the ring mission, saying I needed to pick it out, but that turned out to be a total joke. I went to the first jewelry store I could find in town -- Katie was sent to tag along -- and I picked out the first ring I saw. While I was going to pay for it, my phone rang. My mom said Katie had sent her a picture of the ring and Charlotte's mom, who was over at our house planning the wedding, said the ring I picked out wouldn't do. So off we went to another store. Nothing there was acceptable. Then to a third store and, once again, nothing was good enough. Once I'd gone through all the jewelry stores in town, I moved on to the next city. It wasn't until one week later, at the fourteenth fucking store, that I found a ring that was acceptable to our mothers. So if Katie told you that it took me a week of chasing around a bunch of different stores to find a ring good enough for Charlotte, that was the technical truth. Nothing I found was good enough, according to our mothers. But if it had been up to me, I would have been done in ten minutes."
