Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
MYA
I ’ve been off all day.
The kind of off that settles in your bones before your eyes even open. The kind that makes everything feel wrong—even the air. Like the world tilted half a degree overnight, and no one but me noticed.
It started with the dream.
Not a nightmare in the traditional sense. No monsters or shadows or screaming. Just silence. Stillness.
Fletch standing at the edge of a room, his back to me, walking out the door without a word.
Just like before.
And somehow, that hurts more than any cruel goodbye ever could.
Because it happened. Not in a dream—but in real, gut-wrenching, soul-bruising reality. Before the accident. Before the twins. When I needed him and he wasn’t there. When I was scared and he disappeared.
He didn’t say he didn’t want us. He didn’t have to.
He left.
And today? Even with him back, with things going better than I ever thought possible, I can’t shake the tightness in my chest. The weight in my lungs. This gnawing sense that everything is too good. That it’s all glass just waiting to shatter.
So I bury myself in work, clinging to Reese’s campaign briefs like a life raft. A fresh drop for Simply Reese. A new line of seamless maternity leggings and matching zip-up hoodies in the softest bamboo blend I’ve ever touched. I’m supposed to be drafting content for the pre-launch countdown, but all I can think about is the ticking clock in my own head. Reese offered to watch the twins so I could get some work done and I’m more than grateful for the slight reprieve. I need to work to keep myself distracted today.
I’m still staring blankly at a blinking cursor when the front door creaks open.
“You got a minute?” Fletch’s voice slices through the haze, warm and familiar and dangerous in the way comfort always is when you don’t trust it to last.
“Kind of swamped,” I say, not looking up.
He doesn’t take the hint. I hear the low thud of his boots across the floor, the soft exhale through his nose.
“Well, too bad. You’re coming with me.”
I finally glance up, squinting like I’ve been dragged out of a dream. “For what?”
His grin is annoyingly smug, like he knows I’m not really going to fight him on this.
“I’m working,” I protest, gesturing toward the screen like it matters more than the ache behind my ribs.
“Mya.” His voice drops an octave. “Trust me.”
Those two words. They unravel me.
With a sigh, I push back my chair and stand. “Fine. But if this is another trip to the barn to show me how cute the goats are now that you’ve named them after Disney characters?—”
“It’s not,” he chuckles, already leading me out.
The drive is short. Tense. He doesn’t say much, and I don’t ask. We pull up in front of a gate I’ve never noticed before, nestled between rows of trees still bare from winter. He hops out and unlocks it manually, then drives us down a gravel road that crunches like shattered glass beneath the tires.
We stop in front of a farmhouse.
Not some quaint little Pinterest cottage with ivy on the porch and flower boxes under every window. No, this place is big. Bigger than I expected. Two stories tall with a wraparound porch that looks like it used to be the stuff of storybooks—before time got its hands on it.
The white paint is peeling like sunburnt skin, cracked and curling at the edges. One of the shutters hangs a little crooked. The porch railing is chipped, like someone once gripped it too hard too often. The gravel driveway is uneven, the steps worn smooth from years of feet and seasons and weather. The windows—tall and wide—are smudged with dust, but behind them I can almost see what this place was… and what it could be again.
It’s beautiful, in the way things are when they’ve endured.
A house with bones. With stories.
“What is this?” I ask, heart in my throat again—but this time, it’s not fear. It’s something else. Something dangerous.
Fletch rounds the truck and opens my door. “Come on.”
I let him help me down. His hand stays wrapped around mine, warm and grounding, even as my pulse spikes like it’s trying to escape my chest.
“Seriously, where are we?”
He leads me up the steps. Unlocks the door. Opens it with a creak and a soft, proud smile.
“I bought it,” he says simply. “At auction. Needs work, but it’s ours.”
The word hits me like a brick
Ours.
I step inside on instinct, like the house has pulled me in by the hem of my sweater.
The air smells like old wood and dust and something faintly sweet—maybe pine, maybe memory. The hardwood floors stretch out beneath me, wide-planked and honey-colored beneath the grime. They’re scuffed and worn in all the right places, the kind of wear that says people lived here. Danced barefoot here. Argued and laughed and probably cried here. The kind of floors that hold echoes.
To my left, there’s a brick fireplace with a carved wooden mantel, aged but sturdy, like it’s been waiting its whole life for Christmas stockings and hot cocoa and two boys in matching pajamas squealing about Santa. I can already see a soft rug in front of it, maybe a blanket or two—something thick and oversized and perfect for curling up on a winter night.
The ceiling above is tall, with thick, exposed beams running across it—weathered and bold like they’ve held generations of secrets. They feel like arms, stretching out to hold the house together. To hold us, maybe, if I let them.
And the kitchen… God. It’s all potential and charm, with cabinets that need sanding and a sink that probably leaks, but there’s a wide, open space in the center. Big enough to cook a holiday meal. Big enough to sway to some old love song while dinner simmers and toddlers bang spoons on the floor.
Big enough to be ours.
The vision comes too fast. Too easy.
Too much.
“You… bought a house?” My voice shakes. “Why?”
He laughs, rubbing the back of his neck. “Because I love the cottage, but it’s not really mine. I want to build something permanent. With you. With Kingston and Kody. A real home.”
His eyes are shining with hope, with certainty. But all I can feel is the panic clawing its way up my throat.
I step back. “Fletch…”
“No,” he says quickly. “Don’t do that. Don’t go there.”
“I’m not,” I lie. “I just—I didn’t expect this. It’s a lot.”
“You’ve had a lot, I know. But this—us—it doesn’t scare me anymore.”
It’s quiet for a beat too long. My hands shake, so I shove them in the pockets of my coat. “It scares me,” I whisper.
And he steps closer, crowding my space in the best way. “I know. But I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I bought this place because I finally see forever and it looks like you.”
I don’t know how long I stand there in the center of that quiet, echoing house.
Long enough to imagine our twins toddling across the floor, sticky-fingered and giggling. Long enough to picture Fletch barefoot in the kitchen, flipping pancakes while music hums from a speaker on the windowsill. Long enough for the dream to start curling itself around my ribs like ivy.
And that’s when the panic hits.
It starts low in my gut and rises like smoke—slow but suffocating. My throat tightens, my skin prickles, and suddenly the walls feel too close, the air too thick.
I turn on my heel and walk out the front door.
Not run. Not storm. Just… move.
Because if I stay inside that house another second, I’m going to start believing it’s mine. That we’re real. That this life he’s building isn’t just another illusion set to collapse the second I let myself reach for it.
The porch creaks beneath my boots as I step out into the cold. I suck in a breath, sharp and biting, trying to calm the buzz beneath my skin. Trying to get my lungs to work. Trying to stop the flood of memories clawing up from the place I buried them.
I grip the railing like it might keep me from unraveling.
The door clicks open behind me.
“Mya?” Fletch’s voice is careful. Quiet. Like he already knows I’m halfway to falling apart. “What’s going on?”
I don’t turn around. I stare out at the trees instead, bare-limbed and brittle against the slate-grey sky. Everything is still. Quiet. Too quiet.
“I had a dream last night,” I whisper.
He doesn’t respond. I know he’s listening.
“You walked away,” I say. “Didn’t look back. Didn’t say anything. Just left.”
Another breath, sharp and shaky.
“And the worst part is, I didn’t wake up mad. I woke up scared. Because I remembered exactly what that felt like. Not knowing where I stood with you. Wanting so badly for you to be someone I could count on and?—”
My voice cracks.
“I don’t know how to do this again,” I admit, raw and small and completely unguarded. “To believe in something just for it to fall apart. To let myself want this—you—and end up standing there with nothing but empty hands and a broken heart.”
I hear the slow tread of boots across the porch before I feel him behind me. His hands slide gently around my waist, tentative but certain, like he’s afraid I’ll shatter but he’s not letting me go.
“I’m not walking away,” he says into my hair, low and rough. “Not this time.”
I want to believe him.
God, I do.
But belief is a dangerous thing when you’ve been burned by it before.
So I press my lips together and say the thing I’ve been trying to swallow since the second he opened that damn front door.
“And if you wake up one day and change your mind?”
His arms stiffen around me but he drops them when I turn to face him.
I don’t give him time to soften the blow. “What if this house, this future, all of it is just a moment for you? A good stretch. A phase. And then one day you wake up and realize you’re not built for it, and you walk out like you did before?”
Fletch pulls away like I’ve slapped him. He takes two steps back and stares at me like I just lit the match to the future he’s trying to build.
“Mya,” he says tightly. “Don’t.”
“I have to.” My voice is shaking now. “Because I can’t keep pretending like none of it happened. Like I didn’t spend months trying to figure out what I did wrong to make you stop looking at me. Like you didn’t check out and vanish when I needed you most.”
His chest rises and falls, sharp and uneven. His jaw clenches like he’s holding back a scream.
“You think I wanted to disappear?” he snaps. “You think it was easy for me? Being around you—being around us—and knowing I was screwing it all up?”
“I think you gave up!” I fire back, heart pounding. “I think you got scared, and instead of facing it, you buried your head in your music and left me to carry everything alone.”
“Because I didn’t know how to do it!” he explodes. “I didn’t know how to be enough for you, for them. For any of it.”
His voice breaks and something in me stutters.
“I was scared,” he says, quieter now. Shaking. “But not like before. Not the kind of scared you’re talking about. You want to know what real fear is, Mya?”
I can’t speak. Can’t breathe.
“It’s getting a call at two in the morning from a nurse who can’t even tell you if the woman you love is going to make it.It’s sitting in a hospital waiting room for seven hours not knowing if your kids—your sons—are going to survive. It’s seeing you unconscious, hooked up to machines, and praying to a God I stopped believing in just to get one more chance to fix what I broke.”
His hands are clenched at his sides now, eyes wild with grief and fury and love.
“You think I’m going anywhere?” His voice cracks. “Mya, I already lost you. I already lived my worst fear. And if I had to go through that again—if something happened to you—there’s nothing left of me after that. I wouldn’t come back from it. So no. I’m not leaving. Not now. Not ever.”
His words crash into me like a tide I wasn’t ready for—violent and unrelenting. But instead of pulling back, he stands there, chest heaving, hands shaking like he’s still half-trapped in that night. In that waiting room. In that version of hell I was too unconscious to remember.
But he remembers. Every second of it.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
“You think that erases what came before?” I ask, not because I want to hurt him—but because the wound in me still bleeds when I poke it, and I don’t know how to stop poking. “You think because you stayed when I was unconscious, it makes up for the way you looked through me when I was still awake?”
His eyes flinch like I’ve cut deep. I don’t stop.
“I needed you back then too. I needed you when I was scared out of my mind, pregnant and overwhelmed and feeling like a stranger in my own body. And you just… faded. You got cold. Distant. You shut me out and shut down, and I didn’t even know why.”
He steps toward me. Not fast. Not angry. Just… wrecked.
“I was drowning, Mya.”
“So was I,” I whisper. “But I didn’t leave.”
“I know.” His voice is thick now. “And I’ll never stop being sorry for that. I hated myself for it then, and I still do.”
A tear breaks free, hot against my cheek. I swipe it away fast, but another follows.
“I thought maybe you regretted everything,” I admit, choking on the words. “That you wished none of it happened. That if you could go back?—”
“I wouldn’t change a damn thing,” he cuts in fiercely. “Not the twins. Not you. Not us. I’d just go back and do it better.”
His hands come up, then drop again. Like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to touch me. And maybe that’s fair.
“I was scared,” he says again, softer now. “And when you went quiet… when you slipped under… I thought I lost the chance to say all the things I should’ve said months ago.”
I stare at him. At the man who once walked away, and the one who hasn’t left my side since I woke up.
And it wrecks me—how they’re both him.
How he’s learning, slowly, painfully, to choose being present over being perfect.
“You hurt me,” I say, voice trembling.
“I know,” he whispers.
“But I never stopped loving you.”
That breaks him.
Fletch staggers back a half-step like the words hit harder than anything else I’ve said tonight. His eyes close, his shoulders dip, and for a second, all I can hear is the wind moving through the trees and the frantic beat of my heart, unsure if it just leapt toward something beautiful or dangerous or both.
And then?—
He’s kissing me.
Not gently. Not carefully.
But like it’s the only thing keeping him alive.
His mouth crashes into mine, desperate and wild, his hands finding my face like he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he lets go. And I should hesitate—should stop and think and breathe—but I only falter for the briefest heartbeat before I melt into him.
Because it’s him. It’s Fletch.
And when I kiss him back, it’s not with questions or caution—it’s with everything I’ve been holding back. All the ache, all the anger, all the impossible love that never stopped pulsing under the surface of my skin.
He groans against my mouth, low and guttural, like he’s starving and I’m the first taste of something real after too long without. His hands slide down, gripping my hips like he’s trying to ground himself—and it only makes me press closer, fingers curling into the front of his hoodie.
It escalates fast.
The kind of fast that makes my breath stutter and my knees weaken, the kind that makes me forget about cold porches and chipped paint and all the ways we’ve broken each other.
His tongue slides against mine, and I gasp into his mouth. The sound turns him feral. He grabs the backs of my thighs, hoisting me up with effortless strength, and suddenly my legs are wrapped around his waist, my back pressed to the wood siding of the house.
“Fletch,” I whisper, breaking the kiss just enough to breathe.
He looks at me, eyes wild and wrecked, lips kiss-bruised, chest rising like he’s holding back the storm he’s barely containing.
“I want you,” I say, voice shaking.
Because I do.
Not just the kiss or the heat or the ache that’s been building for weeks.
I want him. All of him.
Even the parts that broke me.
Even the parts that scare me.
He exhales like the confession shatters whatever control he had left.
“Mya…”
I nod, threading my fingers through his hair. “Take me home.”