The Welcoming

He gave me three choices. One, he could turn me over to Juvie. Two, he could beat the hell out of me. Three, he could give me something to eat.”
    “What did you do?”
    “It’s hard to play it tough when a two-hundred-pound man’s pointing a .45 at your belt. I ate a can of soup. He let me sleep on the couch.” Looking back, he could still see himself, skinny and full of bitterness, lying wakeful on the lumpy sofa.
    “I kept telling myself I was going to rip off whatever I could and take off. But I never did. I used to tell myself he was a stupid bleeding heart, and that once it warmed up I’d split with whatever I could carry. The next thing I knew I was going to school.” Roman paused a moment to look up at the sky. “He used to build things down in the basement of the building. He taught me how to use a hammer.”
    “He must have been quite a man.”
    “He was only twenty-five when I met him. He’d grown up on the South Side, running with the gangs. At some point he turned it around. Then he decided to turn me around. In some ways he did. When he got married a couple of years later he bought this old run-down house in the suburbs. We fixed it up room by room. He used to tell me there was nothing he liked better than living in a construction zone. We were adding on another room—it was going to be his workshop—when he was killed. Line of duty. He was thirty-two. He left a three-year-old son and a pregnant widow.”
    “Roman, I’m sorry.” She moved to him and took his hands.
    “It killed something in me, Charity. I’ve never been able to get it back.”
    “I understand.” He started to pull away, but she held him fast. “I do. When you lose someone who was that much a part of your life, something’s always going to be missing. I still think about Pop all the time. It still makes me sad. Sometimes it just makes me angry, because there was so much more I wanted to say to him.”
    “You’re leaving out pieces. Look at what I was, where I came from. I was a thief.”
    “You were a child.”
    He took her shoulders and shook her. “My father was a drunk.”
    “I don’t even know who my father was. Should I be ashamed of that?”
    “It doesn’t matter to you, does it? Where I’ve been, what I’ve done?”
    “Not very much. I’m more interested in what you are now.”
    He couldn’t tell her what he was. Not yet. For her own safety, he had to continue the deception for a few more days. But there was something he could tell her. Like the story he had just recounted, it was something he had never told anyone else.
    “I love you.”
    Her hands went slack on his. Her eyes grew huge. “Would you—” She paused long enough to take a deep breath. “Would you say that again?”
    “I love you.”
    With a muffled sob, she launched herself into his arms. She wasn’t going to cry, she told herself, squeezing her eyes tight against the threatening tears. She wouldn’t be red-eyed and weepy at this, the most beautiful and exciting moment of her life.
    “Just hold me a moment, okay?” Overwhelmed, she pressed her face into his shoulder. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
    “That makes two of us.” But he was smiling. He could feel the stunned delight coil through him as he stroked her hair. It hadn’t been so hard to say, he realized. In fact, he could easily get used to saying it several times a day.
    “A week ago I didn’t even know you.” She tilted her head back until her lips met his. “Now I can’t imagine my life without you.”
    “Don’t. You might change your mind.”
    “Not a chance.”
    “Promise.” Overwhelmed by a sudden sense of urgency, he gripped her hands. “I want you to make that a promise.”
    “All right. I promise. I won’t change my mind about being in love with you.”
    “I’m holding you to that, Charity.” He swooped her against him, then drained even happy thoughts from her mind. “Will you marry me?”
    She jerked back, gaped, then sat down hard. “What?
What?
”
    “I want you to marry me—now, today.” It was crazy, and he knew it. It was wrong. Yet, as he pulled her up again, he knew he had to find a way to keep her. “You must know somebody, a minister, a justice of the peace, who could do it.”
    “Well, yes, but . . .” She held a hand to her spinning head. “There’s paperwork, and licenses. God, I can’t think.”
    “Don’t think. Just say you will.”
    “Of course I will, but—”
    “No buts.” He crushed