Chapter Eighteen
Dot
The kitchen smells like garlic, basil, and comfort.
The good kind—the kind that wraps around you like a blanket instead of pressing down on your chest. He moves beside me, barefoot, chopping vegetables with quiet precision while I stir the sauce.
We don’t talk much, but we don’t have to.
It’s the kind of silence that says everything.
Familiar. Easy. The air hums with the unspoken.
Every time our hands brush, my pulse spikes. His forearm grazes mine when he reaches for the salt, and it’s ridiculous how that one touch feels like gravity choosing sides.
“Need more garlic?” he asks, glancing over with that half-smile that could ruin nations.
“Always,” I say, handing him the jar. “I like it when food has a personality.”
“Just like you,” he murmurs, not even realizing he said it out loud. Or maybe he does. With Camden, I can never tell where the line is between accidental and intentional.
He moves around me as if we’ve done this a thousand times. Maybe we have, in smaller ways—helping my dad make pancakes, sneaking snacks in the team lounge, sharing space in kitchens and arenas, and memories. But this is the first time it feels like ours.
By the time dinner’s done, we’re laughing over the disaster we made. Flour on the counter. Tomato sauce on the floor. I have no idea how it got there, but Camden’s grinning at me like I’m the best mess he’s ever seen.
“Cleanup or dishes?” I ask.
“Neither.” He leans against the counter, watching me. “We’ve worked enough for one night. How about a fort?”
“A fort?”
He shrugs. “Like when we were kids. Blankets, pillows, movies. Only difference is—” His gaze dips to my mouth for half a second before finding my eyes again. “We’re old enough for wine now.”
That smile should come with a warning label. “You kept that bottle from dinner?”
“Of course I did.” He rummages through the fridge, grabbing the bottle and supplies. “Grab the extra blankets from the closet in my room—let’s build it in there. Less kitten interference.”
I wipe my hands and make my way to his bedroom, the door cracked just enough for me to slip in. It’s neat in here, surprisingly so. A desk, a few framed photos, a perfectly made bed. It smells like his cologne—clean and woodsy and him.
I open the closet and pull down a stack of folded blankets, but something catches my eye on the top shelf. A cardboard box with a frayed corner and a faded label that says stuff.
It’s the kind of box people keep because they can’t bring themselves to throw away what’s inside.
My heartbeat slows.
I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t.
But I do.
When I pull off the lid, I stop cold. Inside are scraps of our lives. The movie stub from a class field trip. A photo of us grinning with dirt-streaked faces after building our first “real” fort.
My tongue presses against the roof of my mouth. He kept it all.
Every piece of us.
And I don’t know whether to cry—or finally believe this might be real.
I sink down to the floor with the box in my lap, tracing the edge of a wrinkled photo that smells faintly of dust and time. Camden’s twelve years old in this one—skinny, bright-eyed, and proudly holding a large rock. I’m beside him, grinning wide, with a gnarled stick that I’m using as a cane.
I laugh under my breath, the sound catching halfway between fondness and heartbreak.
Beneath the photo is a pink straw—the same one I’d chewed on nervously that day he came back to Vegas to stay for good.
He must’ve stolen it before we packed up my lemonade stand.
A set list I wrote when I was going to sing at an open mic night, so I could be like my mom.
I bailed. Cam said he was proud of me, even if I didn’t sing “Landslide.” He always believed in me even when I didn’t.
The program from our middle school musical, where he played a tree because he didn’t want to sing, and I was a stagehand because I didn’t want to be seen.
Every tiny artifact is a thread connecting me to every version of us that ever existed since that first day he protected me from the high school boys harassing me.
And suddenly all rational thought scatters.
I realize that he’s been keeping pieces of me all along, while I’ve been trying my whole life not to take up space.
“Hey.” His voice is soft from the doorway. He sets down the wine and glasses on the nightstand. “You get lost in there?”
I freeze, clutching the straw. “Sorry. I—uh—found your time capsule.”
Camden steps into the room, scratching the back of his neck, a faint blush coloring his cheeks. “Oh. That.” He crouches beside me, the floor creaking beneath his weight. “Didn’t mean for you to find that tonight.”
My throat feels tight. “You kept all this?”
“Yeah.” He looks down at the box, then up at me. “Guess I’ve always been kind of sentimental about you.”
That shouldn’t undo me the way it does. My pulse pounds in my ears. “Camden…”
He smiles, shy and unguarded in a way I don’t see often. “You were the first person who saw me. Before the hockey. Before the noise. I guess you feel like home to me. I didn’t want to forget that.”
The words hit harder than they should. My eyes sting. I tell myself it’s the dust, but we both know better.
“I thought I was the only one who remembered all this,” I whisper.
“I remember everything,” he says simply. “Every stupid inside joke. Every time you laughed so hard you snorted. Every time you looked at me like I was worth something.”
I want to melt into him. To let this be the moment where I finally stop running from what’s always been true. But the ache in my chest says I can’t. Not yet.
If I let myself fall all the way, there’s no safety net. My mom’s shadow stretches long behind me, whispering that love always ends in ruin. And my dad—he’s still broken, still fighting. How can I tie myself to someone when my own life feels like it’s held together by duct tape and denial?
Camden doesn’t push. He just sits there, shoulder pressed to mine, warm and steady.
And somehow, that makes me love him even more.
Camden doesn’t say anything for a while.
He lets the silence stretch, heavy but not uncomfortable, while I trace the edge of an old digital printout with my thumb.
We’re fourteen in this one—standing in front of his parents’ garage, my arm slung over his shoulders, both of us sunburned and sweaty from rollerblading all afternoon.
He’s mid-laugh, eyes crinkled, braces flashing, a smear of Powerade across his cheek from the bottle I dumped on his head.
“Remember that?” he asks, leaning closer until I can feel the warmth of him against my side.
“How could I forget? You dared me to do it.”
“And you did it before I even finished the sentence.”
“You said you needed to cool off! Sometimes I take you literally.”
He laughs, and the sound wraps around me like summer—lazy and golden and devastatingly safe. I want to crawl inside it and stay there.
He reaches into the box and pulls out another scrap—this one a piece of notebook paper, edges frayed, my handwriting looping across it in purple pen: You’re my favorite person.
I blink. “You kept that?”
“Yeah.” His voice softens. “You wrote it the day my mom left for Africa. I was pretending I was fine, but you saw right through me. You always did.”
My throat closes. I can see it so clearly now—the scrawny boy in the too-big hoodie, trying to act brave when he felt abandoned. I’d pressed that note into his hand at the bus stop. He’d smiled like I’d handed him the moon.
He still looks at me that way.
“You were the only person who ever made me feel like I was enough,” he says. “Even before I was good at anything. Before anyone knew my name.”
I swallow hard. “You’ve always been enough, Camden. You didn’t need to prove that to me.”
“I know. But I wanted to prove it to you.”
There it is—that sincerity that disarms me every single time. My heart clenches painfully. He’s sitting here, looking at me like I hung the stars, and all I can think is how unfair it feels to be this happy when I know I’m going to break his heart.
He deserves someone uncomplicated. Someone who isn’t carrying a thousand pounds of grief and guilt and unfinished business with a ghost. I know how much he wants a wife and children of his own. Roots. And I wouldn’t even know how to be a mother.
“I don’t deserve this,” I whisper before I can stop myself.
He flexes his jaw. “What do you mean?”
“This.” I gesture to the box, to him, to everything. “You’ve been collecting me like memories, Cam, and I don’t even know who I am half the time. You think you love me, but you don’t see all the ways I’ll disappoint you.”
He looks at me for a long moment, unreadable, then reaches over and slides the box aside so there’s nothing between us. “Dot,” he says quietly, “you’re not something I collected. You’re someone I chose. And I keep choosing you. Every damn day.”
A low twinge hits my belly. He means it—I can feel it in my bones.
And that terrifies me more than anything.
I want to tell him not to say things like that. Not when his words feel like a promise I don’t know how to keep.
But I can’t look away. His eyes are steady, steady in a way that makes me feel like I’ve been spinning for years, and he’s the only thing holding me still.
“Camden…” My voice trembles. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” He leans in a little, resting one hand on the floor. “Don’t tell you the truth?”
“No. Don’t make it harder to—” I stop myself before I say leave. Before I ruin this.
He tilts his head. “Harder to what?”
I shake my head. “You don’t understand. You’ve had this perfect life. You’ve always known what you wanted and gone after it. But I’m…” I suck in a breath, trying to explain the ache that never seems to go away. “I’m broken in ways you can’t fix. You’ll get tired of trying.”