Chapter Twenty-Three
The Unglamorous Morning After
Senna woke in the loft the next morning with Colt beside her, both of them bruised in different ways, neither having said very much after they'd finally walked home the night before, exhausted past the point of conversation, falling asleep still half dressed on top of the covers.
Gray winter light came through the curtains, ordinary and undramatic, nothing like the storm that had broken over the city three nights earlier. Colt was already awake when she stirred, watching the ceiling with an expression she couldn't quite read.
"We should talk," she said, and he nodded, and they moved, without discussing it, to the kitchen table.
The same table. She noticed it as she sat down, the specific, deliberate weight of choosing to have this conversation in the exact spot where the first one had broken everything open.
"I don't want to just fall back into what we had before," she said, watching him carefully. "I want to build something structurally different, not just emotionally different. I need concrete terms, not promises."
"Tell me what you need."
"Full financial transparency. Everything, including whatever's left of the debt now that you're out of the club, the actual numbers, not summaries.
I want to see it, not just be told it's handled.
" She held his gaze. "And I want a standing practice.
Once a week, we sit down, like this, and each of us names one thing we've been tempted to hide that week.
Doesn't have to be big. Just has to be honest, out loud, before it has a chance to become a habit of silence again. "
Colt was quiet for a moment, absorbing it. "I can do both of those." He hesitated, something visibly costing him to say next. "Can I go first? On the second one?"
"Please."
"I'm terrified I don't know how to be a husband without the club telling me what that looks like.
Fifteen years of structure just handed me a role and I performed it.
I don't have that anymore. I don't know what kind of man I am when nobody's grading the performance.
" His voice was rough, the admission clearly difficult.
"That's what I've been tempted to hide since we walked out of that yard last night.
I didn't want you to see how lost I actually feel underneath everything I just gave up. "
Senna felt something in her chest ache at the honesty of it, so different from three years of careful, unexamined silence. "Thank you for saying that instead of just being quiet about it."
"Your turn."
She took a breath, matching his courage with her own.
"I'm frightened by exactly how much I already trust this version of you.
Faster than every instinct I have says is safe.
Some part of me keeps waiting for the evidence that it's premature, that I'm making the same mistake as before, and I've been tempted all morning to keep that fear to myself instead of telling you, because saying it out loud makes it real in a way I'm not sure I'm ready for. "
Colt reached across the table and took her hand, not pulling, just holding.
"I don't have anything that fixes that fear.
I don't think promises would fix it even if I offered them.
I think all I can actually do is keep showing up, honestly, week after week, until the evidence outweighs the fear on its own. "
"That's not nothing." Senna turned her hand in his, lacing their fingers together properly. "That might actually be everything."
They sat like that for a while, the pale winter light strengthening slowly through the kitchen window, neither of them in any hurry to fill the silence with anything more than what needed saying.
"I want to go to the studio today," Colt said eventually. "Not to sit outside it. To walk in the front door, with you, like it's just an ordinary Tuesday."
Senna felt something in her chest loosen at the simplicity of the request, the deliberate, quiet ordinariness of it after months of vigils and confrontations and grand, costly gestures. "Okay," she said. "Let's go this afternoon."
They spent the rest of the morning on the practical business of the new terms: Colt pulling up what remained of the debt on his phone, the numbers smaller now than the letter had implied once the club's inflated interest was stripped away by the exit agreement, a manageable structured payment plan replacing what had once felt like an unspoken, bottomless threat.
Senna watched him talk through it without flinching, without the old careful blankness he used to retreat behind when the subject came too close to something he didn't want to feel, and understood that this, too, was part of what had actually changed: not that the hard things had disappeared, but that he no longer seemed to need to disappear from her in order to survive discussing them.
"I got a call from the freight company Ledger mentioned," Colt said, closing the banking app on his phone.
"Legitimate work. Vehicle logistics, mostly.
Nothing glamorous, but nothing that requires me to be anyone I'm ashamed of.
" He glanced at her, something hopeful and uncertain in his expression. "I start next week, if I want it."
"Do you want it?"
"Yeah," he said, and the simplicity of the answer, unadorned by performance or justification, told her more than a longer explanation could have. "I think I actually do."