“Six years, Ethan. I can’t keep waiting forever.”
He stood in our bedroom doorway and watched me fold things into a suitcase.
“Claire, you know I love you.”
“If that’s true, why won’t you marry me?”
He rubbed his forehead the way he does.
“There’s more to this than you realise.”
Three years of that answer. Three years of some version of that sentence.
Ethan has looked after me every time I have been ill. He once drove two hours on a Sunday to fix my father’s roof in the rain and would not take petrol money.
But the moment marriage came up, a shutter came down.
When my sister Rhiannon announced her engagement last Christmas, he squeezed my hand under the table. Afterwards in the car I asked whether we would ever have a night like that.
“Do we have to do this tonight?”
I am thirty-five. I did not want a big day or an expensive ring. I wanted to know whether I was building something or just living in it.
Dad had already offered me the spare room. He adores Ethan — they watch the baseball together most Sundays — so I had fully expected him to arrive and talk me out of it.
When he got there I went upstairs for the last bag.
On the way back down I caught the end of something coming out of the kitchen.
“She thinks I have no intention of marrying her,” Ethan said.
“She just needs a bit more patience,” my father answered.
“Three years isn’t enough?”
I stopped on the stairs with my hand on the rail.
“You said you’d be the one to tell her,” Ethan said. “Every time she asks me about marriage I have to sit there and hide it.”
Dad said something I could not catch.
And then Ethan dropped his voice.
“I bought her ring years ago. But I’m not proposing until you tell her the truth.”
There was a silence in that kitchen that went on long enough for me to hear the fridge.
Then my father said: “And once I tell her, you’ll have to tell her your part in it.”
I came down the last four steps.
“What are you two hiding?”
They both turned round at once.
“Claire.” My father had gone grey. “What did you hear?”
“Enough to know there’s something. Tell me. Now.”
Dad looked at Ethan for a long moment and then he looked back at me.
And the second he started talking, the suitcase went out of my hand onto the kitchen floor.
My father was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease on the fourteenth of September three years ago.
He is sixty-eight. It came late for him, which is the only lucky thing in any of this.
