London, 2010

You aren’t the type of girl people expect him to end up with. You won’t smile on cue, won’t soften your voice around courtiers, and you don’t care for horses or inherited titles. You know how to move through rooms without needing to be noticed. That’s probably why he noticed you.

It started out as nothing—being placed beside him at university dinner, Being paired up on some group project neither of you cared about. He teased you once about how you always looked like you were already thinking five minutes ahead of him. You said, “Maybe I am.”

You weren’t supposed to linger. You weren’t supposed to get close. There were rules—real ones, unspoken ones, old ones. But you kept seeing him. Not on TV. Not in headlines. In stairwells after long nights. In flats in the city. In the kitchen, barefoot, burning toast.

He didn’t fall for you in a dramatic way. It happened the way things grow when no one’s watching—quietly, then all at once.

And when he proposed, it wasn’t with a grand gesture. There were no violin quartets or televised declarations. Just a silence that had lasted too long, a glance that meant something else entirely, and a ring box pulled out like it had been burning a hole in his pocket for weeks.

You didn’t say anything at first.

He didn’t either.

Just sat beside you on the sofa of a flat you rent. Just the two of you and the weight of every decision he’d have to make from now on.

You looked at the ring. It wasn’t new. You recognized it. And he knew you would.

That’s what made your throat close up. Not the sapphire. Not the promise. The fact that he gave you something that had belonged to someone else—because he wanted to rewrite the ending.

And when you finally looked at him, really looked, he just nodded once. Not a question. Not a plea. Just if you want this—if you want me.

You said yes like you’d been waiting to say it for months.

Not because it was perfect. Not because it was easy.

Because it was him. And that was enough.