He knelt with shaking hands and velvet in his pocket, not in some grand ballroom, but in her childhood kitchen, yellow-tiled and warm with memory. The faint hum of her mother’s humming from upstairs, the slow drip of coffee into a chipped mug. It should’ve been perfect. She wore a cardigan too big for her shoulders, sleeves tugged over her fists like a kid still hiding behind grown-up clothes. Her eyes didn’t meet his.

“I can’t,” she whispered, not because she didn’t love him, but because loving him meant stepping too far away from everything else that made her feel safe.

She had always lived in this house. Her mother’s hands in her hair every morning until college. Her father's late-night knock before bed. The sound of the TV through the wall, every room occupied by the comfort of presence. Loving meant staying close, rooted. Marriage—leaving, shifting, changing—terrified her.

He had never asked her to go. Never demanded space she wasn’t ready to give. He had offered to stay. To share the same roof. To wake up to her mother’s pancakes and sit through long dinners where silence meant love. To make a life not apart from her family but inside it.

But fear isn’t logical. It whispers in the dark, takes memories and twists them, makes villains of people who only ever loved you gently.

She looked at the ring like it was a knife.

“She would've made such a lovely bride,” they’d say weeks later, when the whispers circled. “What a shame she’s…” But they didn’t know. No one did. Not the way her heart beat in panic at the thought of after. Not the way she clutched her parents’ silence like prayer.

And he—he didn’t fight it. Not out of anger, but because he knew. Knew the mind builds monsters when it’s scared. Knew she thought he wanted to steal her away.

He would’ve spent forever proving otherwise. But sometimes forever isn’t long enough.