Page 136 of Devil in Disguise
Over to the dresser, and he took out the box.
She said,“Owen.”
He said, “I bought it before I brought you up here. I was going to give it to you on Saturday night.” His smile was a little painful, still. “Or I was going to offer it.”
He got down on one knee.
He took her hand.
He opened the box.
He hadn’t practiced this. He had no idea what to say. All he could give her was his best, so that’s what he did.
“I love you,” he said. “I think I started loving you the very first night I met you. It was impossible. You were too young, or I was too old, and that six-year gap looked way too hard to bridge. I knew you’d never wait. I couldn’t tell my heart one single thing, though, and I haven’t been able to do it ever since. So … Dyma. Will you marry me and love me forever?”
She wasn’t crying, not this time. She was laughing. Eyes like stars. Dimples in her cheeks. Her own woman, and all his. “Yes.Yes.But this … thisring.”
“If you don’t like it,” he said, “we can get a different one. I know it’s not the usual thing.”
It was, in fact, three rings. Or five. A thin, diamond-studded rose-gold band on the top and bottom, and a diamond solitaire on a yellow gold band in the middle, each of the outer rings held to the middle one at the side with a smaller oblong white-gold ring. It was complicated, and delicate, and pretty as can be. Just like her.
He said, “The ones on the top and bottom are you and me. The one in the middle is us. We’re connected to the part that’s us, but we’re each still separate. I thought … I thought that worked.”
The hand holding the box was shaking. His handnevershook, but it was anyway. He couldn’t quite swallow, either. He was just kneeling here, his heart in her hand.
“Owen.” She had both hands on his face, and then she was dropping to her knees with him, and he was sliding that ring onto her finger, where it sat winking up at both of them in a shaft of Wyoming sun. “I love you so much,” she told him. “I love how powerful you are, and I love how sensitive you are. You’re your own man, but you’re just …” Now, at last, there were some tears there. Of course, some of them were his, but still. “You’re just … mine, you know?” she said, and tried to smile. “Mine.”
57
Epilogue
Two yearslater
Owen was waiting to hear a speech.
No, not what you’d think. It wasn’t a football awards ceremony, though he’d gone to one of those this year, too. When he’d won the Art Rooney Award for sportsmanship, Dyma had been there to see it, and he’d been proud. You bet he had. He’d been prouder, though, when his guys won the Offensive Line of the Year award. They’d come a long way since that day two years ago when they’d struggled to protect their quarterback, and he sure liked knowing he’d been part of that.
He was proudest of all today, because on this Friday morning, Dyma was graduating from the University of Colorado’s College of Engineering. Harlan and Jennifer were here with Nick, who was two now, blonde, blue-eyed, and good-looking as his dad, talking a mile a minute and charming everybody in sight.Alsolike his dad. Jennifer was pregnant again, too, and Harlan was walking tall.
Blake and Dakota were here with their little girl, and so were Dyma’s friends, Pavani and Avery. Still a couple, even though neither set of parents was one bit happy about it. Sometimes, though, no matter how it looked to people on the outside, you just knew.
His parents were here, too, of course, and his grandpa, who’d made the trip for it, and Dane and his family. Oscar was here, more ornery than ever at eighty-seven. Harlan had gone up to Wild Horse and flown down with him, which showed you how determined he’d been to have him here for Dyma. Annabelle had come out on a weekend break from Stanford, too, where she’d rowed her way into a scholarship, majoring in Biology and on a path to medical school.
“I’d like to work in Pediatrics,” she’d told him last night, in her usual quiet way. “Teenagers, especially. Life’s hard when you’re a teenager. If there’s anything bad in your life, it’s extra hard.”
Right now, up on stage, the dean was saying, “I’d like to introduce our undergraduate commencement speaker, the recipient of this year’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award for her enthusiastic and committed leadership in developing and shepherding the Sisters in STEM program. The program, under her tireless advocacy, has tutored and mentored over three hundred middle- and high-school girls from underserved communities in math and science over the past two years, and has grown to include over a dozen schools and over a hundred undergraduate and graduate students. Ladies and gentlemen, Dyma Cardello.”
There she went, walking up on stage with a bounce in her step, her black cap and gown and her summa cum laude medal with its purple ribbon no more than a decoration on her shine, and his heart couldn’t have been more full. She adjusted the microphone down, started to speak, said, “Nope. This isn’t cutting it,” adjusted it down some more, and everybody laughed.
Owen didn’t know what she was going to say. She’d refused to show the speech to him, saying, “If I blow it and have to improvise, I want to be the only one who knows.” She sure didn’t look nervous to him, though, when she put her hands on the lectern, looked out at the sea of faces, and said, “When I was deciding what to say today, I remembered what somebody told me my freshman year, when I was so scared and so confused, because college was so much harder than I’d thought it would be, and so was my life. My confidence was so shaken. Man, I thought I’d always be the smartest person in the room! Anybody else ever have that shocking moment of reckoning when you find out you’re sonot?”
A pause for laughter, and she went on. “So my friend said, ‘Real power doesn’t come from what you take. It comes from what you give.’ And I thought, that’s nuts, right? I mean, a general in the Army isn’t powerful because of what he gives, unless what he gives is, you know, bombs. But it made me think—whatispower, really? What is confidence? I guess you could say that I’ve spent the past two years figuring that out.”
Another pause. “There’s this thing I used to think was power. Always knowing what to do, and telling other people. Always being sure. Always getting it right. I thought that was where your confidence came from, too. And then I found out Ididn’talways know what to do, and I sure as heck didn’t always get it right. I thought—do I have to lose my confidence now, because I screwed up? But what I realized, eventually, after a whole lot more screwing up? Always being right isn’t how you get power, and it isn’t where confidence comes from, either. It’s the opposite, because if you think it’s all over as soon as you make that mistake, you get wound up so tight inside that it’s hard to learn, and it’s impossible to lead. All you can think about is yourself and that mistake that’s going to wreck everything. You get scared to take the next step, because everybody will see you make that mistake, and that’ll be it. You’ll be a failure.”
She waited a second, holding them in the palm of her hand. Dyma, telling the truth. “You know what powerreallyis, though?” she said. “It’s being able to go forward knowing youwillscrew up, because you’ll always have more to learn, and lots of times, you’ll learn it from somebody else. Maybe even somebody you’re supposed to be teaching. That’s what humility is, too: being open to that lesson, and letting that person know they taught you something, so they can grow themselves. And the really amazing thing is, once you admit that you don’t always know, that you’ll fail sometimes, that you aren’t always going to be right? It frees you. It’s like a big old rock getting lifted off your chest. Nobody can be right all the time, but everybody can be more rightnexttime. Engineering is learning, just like science is, because engineering is taking the science and applying it to real problems. It’s recognizing that your solution isn’t perfect and working to figure out what you got wrong, and getting other people to think about that with you, so you can fix it. There’s no perfect project. There’s only abetterproject. And there’s no perfect us. There’s no black and white, success or failure. There’s only the next version of ourselves, when we look at what we’re getting wrong and how to do it better. And that’s how I have confidence now. I have confidence that I’ll do better next time, because I know I’ll keep trying.”
Another moment, and she said, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I don’t mean just as a student. But I’m so proud to be here, to be going forward into that next version of myself, and I’m grateful, too. We’ve all got people to thank today. Our family. Our friends. Our fellow students. Our professors. They all helped us get here. And one thing I’d say is—take the time today to tell them. Tell them you appreciate them. Tell them you love them. Well, maybe don’t tell your professor that.” More laughter. “Nobody really walks through here alone, and I’m so proud to have taken this walk with all of you. And to all of us”—she raised her fist, then pumped it. “Go Buffs!”
