Caprice - Marry Me -

But looking at her—at the smudge of charcoal on her thumb, at the way the fairy lights caught the silver ring in her nose—he realized that a speech was a structure. And Caprice didn’t live in structures. She lived in the spaces between them.

The city hummed below, a distant symphony of taxis and late-night laughter, but up here on the rooftop garden, the world had shrunk to the size of a single candle flame. Nestled between terra cotta pots of overgrown rosemary and a sagging string of fairy lights, a small, velvet box sat unopened. Its owner, a man named Leo, was not kneeling. He was leaning against the parapet, swirling a glass of flat champagne, watching her.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the box, and didn’t open it. Instead, he held it between them like a question mark.

Not a nickname. Not a stage name. Her mother, a whimsical jazz singer who believed in destiny and dissonant chords, had named her for the unpredictable, the fleeting, the beautiful chaos of a sudden change in tempo. And Caprice had lived up to it every single day Leo had known her. She had moved into his apartment after knowing him three weeks, dyed her hair emerald green on a Tuesday because “the subway seat was that color,” and once quit a stable job to train service dogs for a month before realizing she was allergic to dander.