It had taken her two seasons to do it, but she'd finally managed to put up the last light fixture. With a smile, she turned to look down at Cam, who held the ladder she stood upon. "It's finished…it's finally finished!" she cried, her voice echoing in the now lit tunnel. Climbing off the ladder, she laughed as Cam hugged her tightly and looked at her with a proud smile. "Now the two towns can finally be truly friends again," he said and Lillian grabbed his hand and dragged him behind her, heading back to her house. "This calls for a celebration!" she announced, and Cam smiled, though in the back of his mind he was nervous.
Howard held forth the blue feather while Laney danced around happily, clapping her hands. "Lillian's going to be my SISTER! Oh we'll have so much fun!" Howard smiled happily as well, reaching up to adjust his curls. "Aren't I just a GENUIS to have gone and gotten a blue feather? I just knew you loved her, Cammie!" Cam, thoroughly embarrassed at this point, sat with a red face at one of the tables downstairs. While he sat silently, pulling his cap to cover his blush, Howard began fantasizing. "You'll have to propose to her romantically, and then sweep her into your arms when she says yes, and oh the wedding will just be fantastic-" Cam finally interrupted with a small cough. "What?" he asked politely, and both Laney and Howard looked at him, slack-jawed at his question. "What do you mean, 'what?' You're going to ask her to marry you, aren't you?" Laney demanded. Both father and daughter gasped dramatically when Cam shook his head slightly. "It's not that I don't want to marry her…but right now isn't the time. Her brother just got married yesterday after all, how terrible would it be to upstage his wedding with his own sister's?" While Howard and Laney nodded thoughtfully, Cam continued. "Besides that…I want to make sure she won't be put in anymore danger once we're married, and the only way that will happen is if she fixes the tunnel and has it opened. After that, she's bound to be safe…there won't be anything dangerous like construction to do." As soon as the words left his mouth, Laney leaned forward to look at him. "So you'll ask her when the tunnel's open then?" Cam turned red, but nodded, much to Howard's and Laney's delight. "Great! So I can start planning anyways, right?" Howard asked, while Cam sighed and took the blue feather, shoving it in his pocket and making a mental note to put it in his bottom drawer along with another thing he eventually planned to give Lillian.
While Lillian started mixing the ingredients for the cake she was making, Cam fidgeted nervously in the doorway of her kitchen, playing with the small wrapped gift he held in his pocket, along with the blue feather. With a quiet, nervous sigh, he crept forward and placed his arms around her waist. She blushed lightly but smiled up at him before continuing on with her work. "Are you going to help me with this?" she asked, and Cam, in all his nervousness could only shake his head. With a shrug, Lillian started measuring out the flour and other ingredients when Cam took a deep breath, opening his mouth to say something. Right as he was about to say her name, she turned to him and said, "Can you pass me the sugar?" His shoulders slumping in defeat, he meekly grabbed the box off one of her high shelves and passed it to her, watching as she nearly dropped it all over the counter. "Lillian," Cam started, and she looked up at him again, swiping at her cheek with an arm and leaving a long white streak of flour across her face. "Do you….do you want help?" he finished, unable to bring himself to ask her for a walk, where he intended to propose to her by somewhere romantic, like the garden area near her house. She grinned happily at him, and Cam blushed and covered his face with his hat to hide it, noting that with the food on her face she looked cuter than ever. "Would you mind doing me a favor?" she asked, slyly wrapping her arms around his neck and looking up at him with a grin.
