Page 112 of Once Upon A Second Chance

But now it’s louder.

Now I’m thinking about how I’d do it.

Not in Knoxville. Not where we were just kids falling too hard and too fast. That chapter was closed the minute I left her behind thinking I was doing the right thing.

I want to propose here. InMount Juliet. In the town where everything got messy and real and somehow more beautiful than either of us planned.

I want the memory of the proposal to be something rooted in the life we’ve startednow, not the ghosts of who we were.

Maybe at the lake just outside town—where the trees turn fire-red in the fall, and the water stays still enough at sunset to reflect the skylike glass.

Or maybe under the pergola outside the café she loves, the one with the string lights and the giant fern baskets she always compliments but never buys.

Or on the porch of the house we’ll live in someday, when she’s sitting beside me with bare feet and a sleeping baby on her shoulder and doesn’t know I’ve had the ring in my pocket all day.

Somethingours, not performative. Not for a crowd.

For her.

Forus.

But then the doubt slips in, low and quiet.

Will it feel like pressure? Like obligation? I can already hear people whispering—they’re only getting married because she’s pregnant.The kind of thing people in towns like this say in grocery store aisles and church vestibules.

She deserves better than that.

She deserves to know it’s not aboutshould. It’s aboutwant.

I won’t let a baby—not even our baby—define the shape of a promise I’ve carriedfor years. And I sure as hell won’t let it cheapen the moment I ask her to spend her life with me.

I’m so caught in my own thoughts that I don’t realize I’ve gone silent until Penny shifts in her seat, looking at me.

“You’re quiet,” she says, her voice still soft around the edges, like it’s been wrapped in sleep.

I glance at her, smile faintly. “Just thinking.”

“About?”

Her tone is casual, but the question lingers a little longer than it should—like she’s wondering if she’s part of what I’m thinking, or outside it.

I could tell her. Could start the conversation. But she looks tired, and more than that,folded inward.Not just from the hospital or the baby or the night.

From something deeper. She’s still adjusting to the idea of what’s next.

So instead, I reach across the console and slide my hand into hers.

She takes it immediately, no hesitation.

Her thumb brushes over my knuckles, lazy and warm.

“I’m here,” I say, because it’s the only thing that matters tonight.

She doesn’t respond out loud, but I feel her sigh more than I hear it—a long exhale that softens her shoulders and shifts her weight subtly toward me.

We don’t talk for the rest of the drive.

But it’s not silence, not really.