So whatisthe problem? Is it really just that Everett cares about her happiness and isn’t convinced she’ll enjoy living here for the rest of her life? It’s impossible, she assumes, for anyone to know for sure if they’ll be happy in any one place until they die. Or with any one person. But that doesn’t mean people don’t make those kinds of commitments all the time anyway. Besides, she spent agood chunk of her life without any real permanency. Maybe the staying-put-long-term thing will grow old, but she doubts it.
Maybe Everett was counting on Charlie having to stick around and now he’s disappointed that may not happen. That’s the only reason she can think of that makes any sense, and she isn’t unsympathetic; Everett has known Charlie since he was a baby. He cares about him, likes having him here. They’re (technically) family—the only family Everett really has left. But if Charlie leaves, surely Everett could do worse than having the farm in the care of someone with whom he can actually communicate. Someone who will leave the TV on for him without question. If Gretchen knows anything about her spectral friend, it’s that he loves a good gab session and aHogan’s Heroesmarathon. She can provide him with both to ease his sadness about Charlie leaving. If he’s worried about being lonely, he doesn’t need to be. At least this way they’ll have each other.We can miss Charlie together, she thinks.
When she reaches the farmhouse and heads upstairs, she finds Charlie snoring quietly in his bed. It’s tempting to wake him up... maybe with her mouth? But as she silently pads toward him, her lusty intentions disappear. Instead, she watches him sleep, her eyes following each curve and angle of his face, observing the peacefulness of his rest. The next time she glances away and finds the alarm clock on the nightstand, twenty minutes have somehow passed. Neither of them will be able to function in the morning if she wakes him now, and there’s plenty of work to do bright and early.
Her proposal can wait. Something inside her loosens, glad for a temporary reprieve. As excited as she is to have potentially solved their conundrum, it’s not as if she’s eager for all this to change. She’s only just barely gotten sort of used to it.
The empty space beside him seems to call out to her—you don’t have to sleep alone. It’s a lie, of course. An enticing one, but a lie nonetheless. Because Gretchen knows she will have to sleep alone. Maybe not tonight, but for all of her future nights now that she knows how to give Charlie his freedom. Still, she climbs into the bed and snuggles against his warm, strong body. Just this once, she promises herself. Just until morning, when the light of day will highlight the brushstrokes and remind her that none of it is real.
—
Stretched across the bed that still smells like Charlie despite his having vacated it sometime before she woke, Gretchen decides her idea to marry him and take his name so that she can, in essence, take his place at Gilded Creek still feels like the right one deep inside her bones. It isn’t her Eichorn DNA whispering to her, but something else, something less mercenary and sneaky that’s gently guided her to this conclusion. But the practicality of getting Charlie to agree to the scheme has suddenly hit her in the face like an errant flailed arm. “How do you propose a marriage of convenience to the cursed man you’re having sex with?” Googling that on her phone, unsurprisingly, does not give Gretchen any answers. Instead she tries: “How do you propose?” She clicks on the first result.
Make it romantic.
Okay, well this isn’t going to be helpful either. Because this proposal has to be the opposite of romantic. It has to be... businesslike. This is, in essence, a business decision. It’s a career move for both of them. Her from bullshit artistry to goat farming. Him from goat farming to librarianship, or whatever it is he’s going todo with his life once he’s no longer tied to Gilded Creek. This has nothing to do with the love she may or may not feel for him and everything to do with the most mutually beneficial solution to the problem at hand. That’s what she’s going to tell herself. That’s what shehasto tell herself.
So Gretchen goes back to her own room and dresses in her usual white undershirt and the train engineer overalls, rolled up high on her calves to make space for the rain boots she’ll put on before heading outside. She wrangles her hair into a messy bun atop her head and goes downstairs. Her heart thuds so hard she feels it in her skull as she enters the kitchen and finds Charlie sitting at the table there, eating his breakfast. He’s wearing another of Ellen’s sweaters, this one rust, fuchsia, and sky blue. For a moment, she has the ridiculous thought that if she could crawl inside it too, they could live there together in peaceful, ugly Technicolor contentment.
“Running late today?” she manages, heading for the cabinet that holds the twiggy cereal she’s somehow grown to look forward to in the mornings.
Charlie swallows the bite he was chewing. “A little.Someonehas kept me up late the last two nights.” He gives her an accusing look, but it’s mixed with a playful smile that makes her heart feel like it’s melting, dripping drop by drop into her stomach like an ice cream cone in August. “It’s starting to catch up with me.”
“I’ll try to be more conscientious going forward.” She smiles back as she pours some cereal into a bowl.
He finishes his last bite of breakfast and leans back in his chair, eyes on her as if she might make a good second course. “I think I’d rather adjust my schedule to allow for a later start.”
Gretchen isn’t sure if it’s desire or nerves threatening to creepup her throat. She swallows whatever it is down and forces herself to start the conversation they need to have. “I want to talk to you about something. Something important.”
His face goes serious instantly. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything is fine. Great, actually. I think... well, I think I came up with a way around the curse. A loophole so you can leave Gilded Creek.”
He stands and joins her by the counter. His head tilts, showing he is skeptical but ready to listen.
“Everett and I figured out that the curse treats Waybills by marriage the same as Waybills by birth. So, if you marry someone who then takes your name, andtheystay at the farm when you leave—”
“It technically keeps the property in the family.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m... I’m not really following, Acorn.” But by the firm line of his mouth and the tension in his jaw, Gretchen thinks this isn’t completely true. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say... I’m trying to say that you should marry me, Charlie.”
34
Charlie blinks a few times. “Repeat that, please.”
“You should marry me.”
“I should... marry...”
“Me. Yes. Because then I can be a Waybill, which means you can—”
“Leave Gilded Creek. Yes. I understand that part.” He runs his fingers through his hair. “What are you— This is absolutely— Marry you?”
“I know it sounds drastic, but—”
