Happy Place

by Emily Henry

My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.

He’s become my best friend the way the others did: bit by bit, sand passing through an hourglass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back. He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray. I try not to love him. I really try.

This”—she waves the bottle between us again—“is my family.” It’s mine too, but I’m not worried. I already know: I will love Wyn Connor until I die.

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks. They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places. You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

“No,” he says quietly. “In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.”

At the sound of the door clicking shut, I look up from the crossword I’ve gone back to, jump up from the couch, and pad over to help him with the rain-speckled paper bags. I flick the stove on to make tea and take the bags from his arms, and as I’m setting them on the counter, he catches me by the wrist and looks down at me with such softness and vulnerability that I’m afraid, sure something terrible has happened. Quietly, then, a murmur, he says, “Marry me, Harriet.” “Yes,” I say on a breath. He stills. He blinks, like he’s trying to puzzle out what I just said. The teakettle has started to whistle. I catch his jaw. “Wyn, yes.” His brow tenses. “Wait.” “I don’t want to wait,” I say. He fumbles in his jacket. “Shit. Give me a second. Don’t move.” He turns and runs back to the bedroom, and I stand there shivering, listening to the scrape of dresser drawers. When he comes back, he’s holding out a blue velvet box, his hand quivering. It’s an old white gold ring with a square sapphire mounted in its center. “I thought it looked like you,” he says hesitantly, “but it wasn’t expensive. So if you don’t like it, we’ll replace it, as soon as I can afford—” His face blurs behind my tears. “You just had this?” “I was trying to wait for the perfect moment,” he says, almost apologetic. “Now,” I say. “Now is the perfect moment.” “I just couldn’t keep waiting,” he says, still a little rueful. The tiniest bit of doubt creeps in. I whisper, “What if you get sick of me?” “Harriet,” he says,...

this is so cute

I don’t cry. It’s not real. He promised he would always love me. It can’t be real. But a deeper part of me, a voice that’s always been there, tells me it was always going to end this way. That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy, that I couldn’t give him the kind of love his parents had when my only education on the subject had been the one my parents had.

Everything is changing. It has to. You can’t stop time. All you can do is point yourself in a direction and hope the wind will let you get there.

Like when she looks back at it, all she sees is the happiness of that day she spent here with her parents, rather than the pain of what came after. Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.