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She was closing the door behind a singing Mikey Hadley when she spotted Lucy sitting at a corner table.

“I thought you’d gone upstairs hours ago,” Cal said, sitting down next to her. “You didn’t have to wait up.”

“I wanted to,” Lucy said. “I liked watching you, liked being here.”

“Yeah…” Cal looked at the scratched table top.

“It felt strange, didn’t it?” Lucy guessed.

Cal nodded.

“But it was nothing more than you deserved. A warm welcome and apologies for having done you wrong. You could run this pub, Cal, you know you could. You’d be good at it. You deserve it.”

“But do you?” Cal said, finally looking up.

Lucy frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Do you deserve coming to live here and leaving the galleries and…” Cal trailed off, finally understanding. “You love it here, don’t you?”

Lucy nodded. “But could you?”

Cal took a deep breath and looked around the empty pub. “I love you,” she said simply.

“I love you too,” said Lucy. “I want you to be happy.”

“Here’s the thing,” Cal said. “It’s taken me a while to realize it, but… You make me happy. Everything about you. From the way you constantly support me and push me to do better, the way you have complete faith in me to do anything. The way that you look at me sometimes when you think that I’m not looking.”

“It’s taken you a while to realize that?” Lucy asked.

“No,” Cal said. “No, not exactly. It’s taken me a while to realize that I deserve that. That we all deserve that. That that’s what a relationship is supposed to be about, making each other better. That whole Gestalt thing, you know, the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

“Midnight philosophy,” Lucy grinned. “Alright.”

“You make me better,” Cal said. “And I hope that in a little way, I make you better too.”

“Are you kidding?” Lucy said with a laugh. “How many bills have you paid working behind bars while I painted? How many exhibitions have you held my hand through? You think everything I paint is amazing, even when it’s patently not. Like when I had that portrait phase.”

“Hey, surreal portraits are a thing,” Cal protested.

“They are, but I was going more for realism,” Lucy said. She shuffled closer so that they were side by side and touching. “Cal, I love you. You are my world. And if here is not where you want to be, then I get it. We’ll find somewhere else, we’ll find a home together, somewhere to build something together.”

Just the touch of her was enough. Cal took her hand and held it tight. “Will you marry me?” she asked quietly.

There was a calm silence, then Lucy simply said: “Yes.”

Cal took a breath. “And will you marry me here, in the little church down the road and have our reception right here in this pub?”

“Are you sure?” Lucy asked, turning to look at her.

“I’ve spent too long running away,” Cal said. “Syd once told me that one day I’d have to find something to run to, and she was right. You. I will run to you for the rest of my life. And if here is where you are, then it’s where I am too. There’s nothing to run from here anymore, is there?”

Lucy cupped Cal’s face in her hand. “Absolutely nothing,” she whispered.

“Then let’s stay,” said Cal. “Let’s stay and have friends and a home and a family and each other. Would that be alright?”

“That sounds like a bargain I can make,” Lucy said as she tilted her head. “But only if we can seal it with a kiss.”

Cal didn’t need to be asked twice. She lifted her chin and moved forward until her lips were touching Lucy’s and then she kissed her future wife so thoroughly that everything else in the world ceased to matter.

The lights in the pub twinkled over the beach where the wavescrashed against the shore, and very slowly, the moon rose over a tiny little town that might not always be perfect, but that would always be home.