Chapter 10
Three days later, Dad finally asked.
He waited until after dinner, when the dishes had been washedd and the house had gone quiet.
I sat opposite him at the dining table.
“You’ve been strange all week,” I said. “Tell me.”
He looked exhausted.
“Grace, I want you to consider marrying someone.”
For a second I thought I had misheard him.
“What?”
“A contract marriage.”
I laughed once, because the alternative was believing him.
He did not smile.
“Who?”
“Alexander Reeves.”
The chair scraped behind me as I stood.
“No.”
“Grace—”
“No. Dad, I’ve had dinner with him once. Once. He’s thirty-two, he’s a general, and I’m still waiting for my exam results.”
“I know.”
“I have plans. I have a career. I barely know him. Why would you ask me to do something this insane?”
Dad closed his eyes.
When he answered, his voice broke.
“Because I don’t want to leave you alone.”
Every argument in me stopped.
“Dad.”
“You’ve already lost your mother. I cannot bear the thought that one day you’ll lose me and have nobody standing beside you.”
I went to my knees in front of him and took his hands.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t.”
He touched my hair the way he had when I was small.
“I’m asking you to think about it. I am not forcing you. If you say no, that is the end of it.”
I pressed my face against his knees and cried.
“I can’t marry a stranger because you’re frightened.”
“Then don’t.”
He held me until the worst of the crying passed.
That same evening, Richard Reeves gave his son the same proposal.
Alexander refused before his father finished speaking.
“No.”
“I expected that.”
“I am not interested in marriage, and I will not ask a young woman to marry me for convenience.”
Richard’s expression hardened with grief.
“Eleanor’s heart is failing. Quickly.”
Alexander went still.
“She has asked for almost nothing in her life. She wants to see you settled. She wants to believe there will be someone in this house after she’s gone.”
For the first time, Alexander had no immediate answer.
“I cannot decide tonight.”
“I am not asking you to.”
The next morning, I found Dad in his office and scolded him for answering business emails.
He coughed at breakfast and dismissed it.
That afternoon, while I helped sort old files, a folder slipped from his hand.
I looked up.
His face had gone grey.
“Dad?”
He clutched his chest.
Then he collapsed.
Training took over just enough to keep panic from killing time.
I checked his pulse. Called emergency services. Kept him positioned while his breathing turned shallow and his lips blue.
Inside the ambulance, I held his hand so tightly my fingers hurt.
“You promised me you were okay.”
His eyes opened a fraction behind the oxygen mask.
“I’m trying.”
At the hospital, they took him through double doors and left me in a waiting room where every minute seemed deliberately cruel.
The cardiologist emerged almost an hour later.
“He’s stable for now.”
Relief hit hard enough that I had to hold onto a chair.
Then came the word every family learns to fear.
“But…”
The disease had progressed. Another event might be fatal. There were treatments for comfort and management, but no simple fix waiting behind the next door.
That evening, I sat beside Dad’s bed with my head against his arm.
When he woke, I said the sentence before fear could stop me.
“About the marriage.”
His eyes closed.
“No, Grace. Not from guilt.”
“I know.”
I looked at the man who had learned to braid hair after my mother died, who had cooked every birthday breakfast, attended every school function, sat beside every hospital bed I had ever occupied.
He had spent my whole life making me feel safe.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Tears filled his eyes.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know. But I want you to stop being afraid for me. I want you to rest.”
Across the city, Alexander sat beside Eleanor’s bed.
She did not order him. She did not plead until he surrendered.
She simply told him the truth.
“I have never asked you for anything,” she said. “But if I am allowed one selfish wish, I would like to know that when I am gone, you will not come home every night to an empty house.”
A tear slipped down her cheek.
Alexander wiped it away with his thumb.
Duty could be refused when it was unreasonable.
Love was more difficult.
After a long silence, he said, “I will do it.”
Eleanor pulled him into an embrace.
Neither Grace Zane nor Alexander Reeves agreed because they believed in the marriage.
They agreed because sometimes sacrifice wears the same clothes as devotion before anyone knows the difference.
