“Why didn’t your mother just tell me any of this from the beginning?” I asked. “Why let me believe it was only ever about two thousand dollars a month and some letters?”
⸻
“Because she was terrified you’d say no if you understood the actual stakes,” Silas said. “A stranger marrying a convicted felon for a monthly stipend is one kind of decision. A stranger marrying a convicted felon because it secures access to a multi-million-dollar estate is a considerably more suspicious kind of decision, especially to a court that was actively deciding my guilt at the exact same time.”
⸻
“So she kept me in the dark,” I said, “to protect the appeal, not to protect me.”
⸻
“I think it was some of both,” Silas said. “I also think, honestly, she never expected either of us to actually fall in love along the way. I don’t think she planned for that part at all.”
⸻
I reached for the velvet pouch sitting beside the documents, working the small drawstring loose with fingers that weren’t entirely steady.
Inside sat a ring — not the plain, practical band we’d exchanged behind that scratched prison glass, but something considerably more deliberate, an antique setting that looked like it might have belonged to someone in his family generations earlier.
⸻
“That was my grandmother’s,” Silas said. “I want to actually marry you, Meredith. Properly, this time, in front of people who matter to both of us, with vows that mean something beyond satisfying a clause in an old man’s will. I should have told you all of this the moment I walked out of that prison. I spent a week trying to figure out how to say it without it sounding like I only valued you for what the marriage secured legally.”
⸻
“Do you?” I asked quietly. “Value me for that?”
