Chapter 41
Siobhan
* * *
After, we’re tangled. His head on my chest. My fingers are tracing the scar down his ribs. The scar I've traced so many times, I could find it in the dark. I can find all of him in the dark.
"No more armor."
"No more walls."
"Just us."
"Just us."
The exchange is quiet. A litany. A vow that means more than the one we spoke at St. Demetrios because that vow was strategic, and this one is earned. That vow was two strangers making a deal. This one is two people who have seen the worst of each other and chosen to stay.
I take his hand. Place it on my stomach. Flat. Five weeks. Nothing to see. But his hand rests there with the reverence of a man touching something holy.
"Us. All three of us."
His eyes go soft. The gold warming to something I've never seen. Not even at his most vulnerable, not even on the factory floor. This is beyond vulnerability. This is a man looking at his future and believing, for the first time in his life, that he deserves it.
"All three."
I close my eyes. His hand on our future. The Heaney on the nightstand. The city outside the window. The particular silence of a home that finally deserves the name.
This is what safe feels like. Not the absence of danger — our world will always contain danger. Safe as a verb. Something chosen daily by two people who face whatever comes and return to each other and put their hands on the evidence of what they've built and say: this. This is worth it.
I fall asleep with his hand on my stomach and the knowledge that safe is not a place. It's a person. It's the man breathing beside me who learned, at great cost, that love is not control and protection is not partnership and the woman in his arms is not a problem to solve but a person to trust.
And I think that’s all I’ve ever really wanted.