They spent the morning in no great hurry. Rachel called from her home with a child shouting in the background, and Matthew sent a video of his toddler trying to sing an anniversary song while throwing cereal onto the floor. Evelyn laughed until she had to sit down. David listened to the greetings and felt grateful that the family they had built seemed to have inherited Evelyn's humor rather than his tendency to worry.
Near lunchtime they walked to the little park beside the river where he had proposed. The trees had grown so large that the view was different from the one in their old photographs, and a new pedestrian path curved around the place where David had once knelt in the grass with a ring in a small box. Evelyn pointed out the bench where she had made him sit down afterward because he seemed likely to faint from relief. David insisted he had been perfectly composed, and she told him his memory had never been as reliable as he claimed.
They bought sandwiches from a nearby cafe and sat beneath the trees. For a while they watched children running across the grass and a man trying to persuade his elderly dog to leave a patch of sunshine. The scene was so ordinary that David felt unexpectedly moved. He had spent the first half of his life reaching for a future that seemed to be standing somewhere beyond the next difficult contract; now he understood that the future had been arriving in moments like these all along.
"Do you ever think about what would have happened if the business had closed?" he asked. Evelyn considered the river before answering. "Sometimes," she said. "I suppose you would have found work somewhere. I would have kept doing the books for someone else. We'd have been disappointed, and then we'd have made another plan."
"You make it sound easy." She looked at him. "I didn't say it would have been easy. I said we would have made a plan. We had children, David. We weren't going to sit on the floor waiting for the world to apologize."
He laughed because he could hear her thirty-year-old self saying the same thing. "I used to think if that company failed, it meant I'd failed you," he admitted. Evelyn took a slow sip of water and shook her head. "You loved us, you worked hard, and you listened when I told you the numbers didn't add up. Those things mattered whether the company succeeded or not."
David looked toward the river, his throat suddenly tight. "I wish I'd understood that then," he said. She reached across the picnic table and touched his wrist.
"You understand it now. I didn't marry a fortune. I married a man who came back to fix a window after he'd already been paid. The rest was never the point."
They stayed until the afternoon shadows lengthened. Back home, they cooked their favorite dinner together, and David set the table using the dishes Evelyn claimed were too good for ordinary Tuesdays and therefore ought to be used whenever they pleased. He lit two candles that leaned at different angles, and Evelyn straightened them while pretending to be scandalized by his lack of attention to symmetry. After dessert, he went upstairs to retrieve the small blue box.