Page 118 of Proposal Play

I stare at the photo till my vision goes blurry with memories.

I set it down, but I don’t return to the couch.Something is tugging at me. There’s a pull in my chest. A quiet chorus in the back of my mind that’s growing a little bit louder. Telling me to keep going. Keep asking. Keep looking.

I circle back to the kitchen, pick up the photo of her in the lavender field with the dog in the corner. That was three years ago. She’d wanted to visit Lavender Bliss Farms so fervently that she’d planned it for months. There was one weekend for the peak bloom, she’d said. So we drove to Darling Springs and wandered through the lavender maze, then scoured the fields, the farm’s dog trotting at her side, like he wanted to adopt her. No surprise—Maeve has that way about her. She’d scratched the dog’s head, tossed him some tennis balls, then sniffed every lavender bush, it seemed. She told me scent was most directly linked to memory. “And the more I sniff the lavender, the better I’ll recall this feeling someday. This sweet summer joy I feel right now,” she’d said. “Someday I’ll paint this and call itThat Summer Memory.”

I didn’t want her to miss that feeling, so I took a picture.

Or so I told myself.

But now I wonder…

I turn and take a tour of all the photos of her I’ve framed. The graduation shot, taken more than seven years ago. The ice hotel from five years ago. One from four years ago after she rode a double-loop upside-down roller coaster, and her cheeks were flushed and her hair a mess when she stepped off it. “My heart has never beat so fast,” she’d said.

So I took a picture.

Telling myself it was for her.

It was for her to remember.

It was for her someday.

I walk over to the small mirror by the front door. The one I hung up last night. Her art. Her almost kiss. Her friends’ advice—keep snacks handy.

And in the reflection, I’m looking at the truth of my actions. I didn’t hang her art for the camera crew.

I didn’t hang it for Maeve.

I hung it for me. Because I love it, and I love making her happy. So she’d feel at home here.

All these other pictures? I didn’t take them so she’d have a record of all our days together. I didn’t take them so she wouldn’t lose a memory.

I took them…for me.

So I’d have them.

So I could look at them.

So I could return to them.

As I return to each one, I finally see what I was doing seven, five, four, three, two years ago from behind the lens of my phone.

I was slowly, over time, day by day, falling in love with my best friend.

Miles was right. He was so damn right.

I circle back to the lavender photo in the kitchen.That Summer Memory. My heart thunders mercilessly in my chest. It hammers so hard it nearly hurts.

Because here, after midnight, with Maeve sound asleep upstairs, and me being chased by relentless thoughts all day, I have an answer I didn’t know I was searching for.

My heart isn’t broken.

I don’t come with an expiration date.

I’m not radioactive with romance. Nothing lasted afterI met Maeve because I was falling in love with her all that time.

And I didn’t even know it was happening. Last night, I realized how I felt. But now, I can see this feeling started years before we made a pact at her brother’s wedding. I run my finger absently along my silicone ring as I stare at the photo in the dim light of the kitchen, wondering how I missed this all along.

I can’t miss it now, and I feel freer, lighter, joyful even at the realization. I’m more than capable of love—for all this time, for all these years, it was always her.