And it had. Fin had overcome the twenty per cent chance they’d given her of surviving. They all watched the light slowly return to her eyes every day, until four weeks later, she returned home for the first time.
After months of physiotherapy, Fin could walk without effort, but her body had suffered. The cardiac arrest had damaged her heart permanently. She would be on medication for life and was now living with twice the odds of having a heart attack later in life, or a stroke. It was something they wouldn’t think of. Whatever the odds were for their future, they would overcome them, just like they had for everything else.
Kyle stepped up beside him in the kitchen, having just arrived for their late afternoon barbecue. “You ready to do it all over again?”
Ryan shook his head. “No. Not this time.”
He was clapped hard on the back and caught Kyle’s grin. “Well, last time you came home to a baby. Who knows what you’ll come home to after the next deployment, huh?”
Ryan smiled slowly. “A wedding,” he murmured, taking satisfaction in seeing Kyle’s grin getting smacked off his face from surprise.
“No shit?” Kyle peered out through the window, looking to the ring finger on Fin’s left hand. No doubt he was catching the giant sparkler right now. It was hard to miss. Rachael adored that ring more than Fin did. Fin did love it, but she was always scratching Jacob with it, or whacking it on something. She was worried the stone was going to fall out, but it was insured for God’s sake. It was easily replaced if that happened.
“But it’s not the same,” she’d insisted, pouting until Ryan leaned in and nibbled her bottom lip with his teeth. “It would be a replacement. It wouldn’t have the same soul.”
Ryan laughed. “Baby, that’s mumbo jumbo hippy talk right there.”
“Maybe it is, but I’m all about saving the earth, aren’t I? I’m supposed to be hippyish.”
“Hippyish?”
“It’s a word.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kyle said, bringing him back to the present. “That ring would pay off the national debt.”
“Probably,” Ryan agreed with a laugh, bringing the beer in his hand to his lips and tipping it back for a long swallow.
“When did you ask her?”
“A few nights ago,” he replied, his eyes falling to Rachael and Julie as they returned to the blanket, both fighting over who was next in smothering his son.
Ryan had been impatient to ask her. He waited months for her to heal properly, but when the right moment came, he was suddenly nervous. Waiting until Jacob had been sleeping, he’d made love to her first, so slowly he thought he’d go out of his mind.
Afterwards, with her tucked in his arms, he’d told her to close her eyes.
“Why?”
“No questions. Just do it.”
And she did.
“Ryan?” she called out when his weight left the bed to rummage quietly in the drawer of his bedside table. Finding the ring, Ryan took it from the box, his hands trembling so hard he almost dropped it on the floor. He shook his head at himself. He could lock everything down in the middle of a war, but over this he had no control?
Holding it in his fist, he said, “You can open your eyes now.”
They flew open, finding him standing naked beside the bed. “Come with me,” he commanded, holding his other hand out towards her.
Putting her hand in his, he tugged her from the bed.
“It’s cold,” she told him, frowning.
Grabbing the sheet and bundling it in her arms, he led her down the hall, and after undoing the locks, he walked her through the French doors and outside.
“Ryan. We haven’t got any clothes on!” she hissed, her eyes wide as she pointed out the obvious.
If he had his way, she’d never wear clothes around the house ever again, but she hadn’t liked that idea when he told her. You can’t win them all, he thought, grinning.
“That’s what the sheet is for.”
Reaching the middle of the lawn, Ryan took the sheet from her and after shaking it out, he wrapped it around the both of them until they were bundled together. Her breasts rubbed against his chest, and he tried not to get hard all over again. He had a proposal to get to, not lawn sex, though that one time after they’d lost the house key in the grass was hot. Maybe after.
“What are we doing out here?” she whispered, looking up at him, the cool air swirling harmlessly around them as they shared body heat.
“Look up,” he told her.
A smile spread slowly across her face, but Fin did as he asked. She tilted her head upwards, her long tousled waves flowing in the breeze as they fell down her back.
He looked up with her. It was the perfect night. No clouds. Black sky. Clear bright stars.
“I read the other day that our universe contains more than a hundred billion galaxies, and each one of those galaxies has more than a hundred billion stars. Did you know that every single one of those stars is unique? Out of all of them, not a single one is the same.”
“I did know that,” she murmured, a smile playing on her lips.
“And they’re all beautiful,” he told her.