Every small town has a hill where its young people go to be alone together, and in Bellhaven it was Beacon Hill — not much of a hill, really, a long grass shoulder rising off the old quarry road with the whole valley unspooled below it, the river, the water tower, the grid of streets where everybody's whole life happened in plain sight of everybody else. You could see Murphy's Garage from Beacon Hill. You could see the high school. Daniel had told Sarah once, in the Columbus years, that he'd grown up without a hometown worth the name. Standing on Beacon Hill with the wind worrying her skirt, Sarah understood that he'd grown up in a place he could see all of, and had run from it precisely because it could see all of him.
He had proposed to her the first time in a place nothing like this — a Columbus rooftop, a borrowed ring, rain threatening. She had said no. Not no — not yet, Daniel, ask me when you're not asking because you're scared of losing me. He had asked again at Christmas. Again on her birthday, down on one knee in the kitchen, flour on his hands. And the fourth time, an ordinary Tuesday, in the car, at a red light, no ring at all, just: "Marry me, Sarah. I'm not scared. I just know." She'd said yes before the light changed.
"He asked me four times," she told Ray, at the crest of the hill, while Noah ranged ahead through the grass with a stick, slaying invisible armies. "The first time he ever mentioned this hill — he did once, drunk, at a wedding — he said, 'There's a hill at home where I asked a girl to marry me.' I thought he meant before me. Some high-school girl. Last week I realized—" she laughed, and it hurt, "—he meant this hill. And me. He was talking about the questions, not the place. 'Will you,' four times. He said the hill was where a man asks until he gets it right."
Ray nodded slowly, and took from his jacket pocket a thing like a brass dial — no: a combination lock's face, printed on a card, in Daniel's hand: instructions. Under the flat stone by the leaning pine. The numbers are the asking. First no. Then the times I asked again. Then the day she said yes.
"Month and day of the first ask," Ray said. "Then how many times total. He said only you could open it, and only if somebody told you where to dig — and I wasn't to tell you unless the tank got finished and the time was right, and half a dozen other conditions that mostly boiled down to when Sarah's ready to know the rest."
"And you decided I'm ready."
"I decided the boy decided," Ray said. "I'm just the shovel."
The flat stone by the leaning pine was where Daniel, at eighteen, had carved initials that weather had reduced to archaeology — his, and beneath them, in letters far younger, a *17* so old and moss-eaten it might have been carved by Eli standing there himself, laughing, a hundred years ago. Under the stone: a metal box, green, military, latched, its lock face bright as new.
Sarah knelt in the grass in her good skirt and worked the combination with shaking fingers. The date he'd first asked. The number of askings — four. The date she'd said yes.
The lock opened with a click she felt in her teeth.
Inside the box, wrapped in oilcloth, were two things: a small digital voice recorder, of the kind Daniel had used for his students' oral histories, with a label in his hand — PLAY ALOUD. NOT ALONE, BUT ALOUD — and beneath it, an envelope, thick, sealed, labeled in the same hand:
*FOR SARAH — READ ALONE.*
And Ray, who had driven her up the hill and dug beside her without a word, looked at the envelope and then politely, deliberately, at the whole valley below them, and said, "I'll be by the truck with the boy. Take the time it takes."
Noah had opinions about the hill. The hill, he informed the truck at large on the drive down, was obviously where important things were kept, and he intended to bury a box there himself, containing: one drawing (not his best, a decoy), the wrapper of the ice cream from Saturday (evidence), and a note for whoever, which he would write when he had something that needed saying from underground. "Dad's box took sixteen years," he said. "Mine's going to be faster. I'm not going to wait around like a grown-up." Sarah, who had Daniel's envelope in her bag and Daniel's voice still fading in her ears like a bell, said, "That's the whole family problem in one sentence, baby," and Noah, pleased to have summarized something, said, "I know."