Brenna, Brat (Detroit ABCs)

Chapter 15

M y dad skimmed down the screen again, his index finger directing his eyes, and he nodded. “This makes sense to me, Brenna. I’ve noted some adjustments we can make, but I don’t have any major concerns. It looks like you put a lot of thought into this.”

I had, and Sophie had helped me. She and I had figured out where my new sewing workshop should be: on the grounds of Juliet’s house, where there was enough acreage that she and Beckett probably wouldn’t notice me or several hundred other people hanging around, either. We had written out parameters to guide how I would manage my time, afford my materials, and deal with many, many other issues. “There are no major concerns, besides the large possibility of people not liking what I make and not wanting to buy it,” I mentioned.

“I think you produce very handsome items,” he told me. “I would be happy to model your clothes at my office.”

“Thanks, Dad. Thanks for looking at my business plan, too. I’ve been putting it off, but I’m going to really make a push to start designing for real. I feel like it’s now or never.” And I could take other people into account when I sewed, I’d decided, and pay attention to their wants and needs. I was going to try to do that more in my life in general.

“You have a lot of years ahead of you,” he advised. “If this doesn’t work right now, it doesn’t mean that it’s over forever.”

“Like how you and Mom could get back together? It might not be over.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “That’s between the two of us,” he said, and wouldn’t elaborate. His statement was kind of true, except their decisions affected all of us—including stupid Dion, my mom’s new son. This was my day off and I was meeting him next, since he’d been texting and asking to see me since we’d returned downstate, and I’d finally given in. Oddly, he’d suggested going to a little restaurant on the same street as where the gallery had been, the place that we had previously bought sandwiches for lunch. He’d often had no money…anyway, that was where I was headed now.

I parked near where I always used to leave my car, and then before going to the deli, I walked to the cordoned-off area where our building had stood. Most of the rubble had been cleared away, and the businesses on either side were under construction and being repaired. Nothing was happening in this particular place, though. It was very quiet and also very sad.

“Hi.”

I looked over at Dion, who had approached nervously, in a slinking way. “Hello,” I said.

“It’s a mess here.” He also looked at where we’d worked, where there had been a pretty building filled with weird art and junk. “It’s funny to think how quickly things changed. I would have stayed there forever delivering my aunt’s drugs and playing on my phone.”

“I’m sorry this happened but I think it’s better for you,” I answered. “It’s better for me, too. We were stuck in a rut and neither of us was happy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “And I got a new job.”

“Really?Where?”

He told me about it as we walked to the restaurant. He sounded excited, which was not an emotion I would have previously associated with him and work. “I’m still going to live with Mom,” he told me. “I mean, Jackie. But when my lease runs out, we’re going to move up north. I’ll have some real experience on my résumé by that point so I can get a good job up there, too.”

“You’re moving? And who is ‘we?’” I asked suspiciously. “Do you mean you and my mom?”

“Me and Carrington,” he corrected. “Jackie is going to stay in her house forever, hoping for your dad to come home. She already put everything back in his office there, trying to duplicate how it used to be. The meditation room is gone.”

I hardly heard the last part. “You and Carrington are moving in together?”

“Not for a while. She’s looking at jobs she can do remotely,” he explained. “It would be better for her to live somewhere else.”

We sat down at a table, and I needed the chair because I was stunned. “Dion, you two hooked up less than a week ago,” I reminded him. It had been a long few days, with Campbell away in Texas. He hadn’t seemed to want to talk to me much, which I understood. He probably didn’t feel like he could disclose anything from his meeting with his lawyer, and he was probably also embarrassed by what had happened up north. So was I.

Dion shrugged. “When you know, you know. Carrington is it, and I was screwing around and wasting time before I met her. But Mom told me to give it a while, not to rush. That’s why I’m not moving out.”

Her advice to slow down was interesting, since she’d married my dad about five minutes after meeting him.

“It will be good to live separately and date, that’s what Mom says. We’re having Carrington over for dinner tonight.” He looked extremely excited. “We’re making pasta with pesto for her. She’s worth washing all that basil, because she’s amazing.”

“When you know, you know,” I echoed. I was glad for them, in a cautionary way that made me question if they’d make it much past the pesto dinner. And I was even sorrier for myself, which was probably a new low for humanity.

“Her dad is taking all the blame,” he mentioned.

“What?”

“Ghregg Bates is going to come out and say that he acted alone. With a few of the other higher-ups and with a few people at the accounting firm, but he’s going to say that his kids weren’t in on it,” he explained. “Carrington is surprised.”

Surprised? I was shocked, and sure that I didn’t understand correctly. “What?”

“Yeah, he’s going to man up. He’s been planning it for a while, that he’s going to swoop in like a hero and fix everything.”

“What?” I asked a third time. I had him explain again, and I learned that this was information from Carrington’s attorney. She had shared it with Dion after avoiding conversations with her own brother for weeks. “You mean, Ghregg is doing something selfless for people?” I asked, still totally taken aback. This had been the secret plot that Campbell had sensed?

“Not completely selfless,” Dion answered. “He’s nailing a vice-president to the wall, and that woman worked for him for twenty years. But he’s going to announce publicly that his children weren’t involved and that he’s the mastermind. Carrie doesn’t think that he liked anyone else getting credit. She doesn’t think anyone will believe him, anyway, and people will still question her.”

“You call her ‘Carrie?’ And who gives a crap what other people think?”

He shrugged. “She does. It’s something she’s trying to work on.”

How did he already know that? It had taken me weeks to learn about Campbell’s hatred, deep-seeded and visceral, of ladybugs. They terrified him, just like how I felt about the dark. I happily removed them from his vicinity and found better homes for them. And at night, he always walked into the house first and turned on lights for me.

“Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing,” Dion continued. “Her dad is stepping up for her and her brother, no matter what’s his motivation is. By the way, you can tell Campbell that I’m not mad about how he acted like such an asswipe at the lake. I know it was because he loves his sister.”

“Campbell doesn’t care about your opinion, but sure, I’ll tell him.”

He moved the silverware on the table, lining it up on his napkin and carefully adjusting it to be totally straight. “I have to tell you something else. I guess I don’t have to, but I figured I should so you don’t worry anymore.” Then he was silent for long enough that I had to reach across the table and whack his shoulder. “Fuck! That hurt,” he said, sounding more like the Dion of old, when we’d worked together at the gallery.

And that was what he wanted to talk about: the gallery and what had really happened to it. “The thing with the fire, it wasn’t about some girl who was pissed off at me. Yeah, I was getting some calls, but those were about my mom’s debts. It wasn’t some crazy person off the street or retaliation for a drug deal gone wrong, either.”

My heart sank. “Then it really was someone was trying to hurt Campbell? Wait, how do you know?”

He looked at me and swallowed. “I wasn’t supposed to find out, but I saw her. She’s old and she’s slow. Everybody else was looking at the fire but I spotted her through the window before she got away and you shoved me toward the back door.”

“What? Who?” I demanded.

“Grandma Shyril.” He nodded when I shook my head. “Yeah, it was my grandma, Chic Cathay. She started the fire.”

“Chic Cathay?” Nicola asked me a few hours later. “Turn your head toward the light. Chic Cathay, the clothes designer, set her own building on fire?”

“Yes,” I answered. “She started the fire on purpose while her daughter and her grandson were there. I guess that they weren’t supposed to be around. The plan was for Alecta to go in that day and get Dion to leave, but she messed up the timing because she’s an idiot.”

“But you would have been there.” My sister’s hand clenched on the mascara wand. “Where are these people?” she asked furiously, and I got the idea that she might want to hurt them.

“Alecta is in Laos where, funnily enough, they don’t extradite to the United States. Chic’s other daughter, Dion’s mother, is on the run in his car, which she borrowed from him when her own was repossessed. But she never returned it and now she won’t respond to him.”

“Great. She sounds great.”

“Chic may or may not be in jail right now,” I went on. “I told Dion that he had to go to the police and report this, or I would. He’s talking to Carrington’s lawyer to make sure that he doesn’t also get in trouble somehow.”

“Holy Mary.” My sister expelled a breath. “You could have been killed.”

“But it wasn’t Campbell’s fault, like Jude said it was when he tossed us out of your house at the worst moment of our lives. Remember how he did that?”

“Jude loves you and you’re going to have to give that up.” She grabbed my chin and yanked my face into a different position.

“I don’t understand why you need to do my makeup,” I told her.

“I already explained that I’m practicing for my neighbor’s wedding. Blot. Why did Chic Cathay start the fire?”

“Shannon’s coloring is totally different from mine,” I pointed out, because unlike me, Nicola’s neighbor was a blonde who tanned. “And Chic set the fire for the insurance money. She really was cooking in pot on the fireplace and her house is falling down. The gallery never made anything but the building had some worth, and after the gum sculptures melted and I got the insurance company to offer a settlement, they came up with the idea to burn the whole thing.”

Nicola shook her head. “Close your eyes.”

“Alecta was in on it, but when the police questioned her, she got scared and took off to Laos. She may have been planning to do that all along. But first, she had me pass along a message to her mother.” She’d been involved in the drug stuff for long enough to be careful about texts and calls among criminal collaborators. “It was supposed to let Chic know that Alecta wasn’t going to tell on her, that they were still a team. I bet she’ll flip, though, if push comes to shove.” I blinked open my eyes and pointed to my sister’s makeup brush. “You know, you won’t be able to use this shade on Shannon, no way.”

“Stop talking and moving your facial muscles. So Dion knew about it, but he wasn’t going to say anything? That weasel.”

I risked her wrath and spoke. “He did say it, though. He is trying to be a different guy.”

“Stop talking, Brenna. If that’s true, then I’m glad,” she answered, “and I’m shocked that our mother may have something to do with his transformation.” She nodded in approval when I didn’t answer. My forced silence gave Nic a lot of time to lecture about the company I was keeping and how I was to stay away from that Chic person, and also how she herself would accompany me to the police to make my own report. “It will be my pleasure to lock up the person who tried to hurt my little sister,” she said, and I thought that it would have also been her pleasure to kill the woman.

Her makeup application had become a little violent as she got madder, and I was glad when it was over. “Now it’s time for the dress,” she said briskly.

“You said to bring it because you wanted to see it. Why do I have to put it on?” I asked.

“I want to see it on you,” she told me. “You’ve been thinking about wearing it since New Year’s Eve, when you didn’t go out and you sat here bored and annoyed with me and Jude. You finally finished it and I want you to wear it. Now,” she ordered. She took the dress off the hanger and held it out for me to step in.

“This is the last thing I’ll make at Campbell’s house,” I mentioned. “He’ll probably be glad for me to move my workroom elsewhere.”

“Do you think so?” She breezed over that, although I’d wanted her to tell me that I was wrong. I’d wanted her to say that Campbell would be bereft without my presence in his lower level.

“I’ll move my operation to Juliet’s guest cottage,” I continued. “It will be more convenient, since there’s a separate entrance.”

“Great.”

“Campbell is supposed to get back today,” I went on. Wasn’t she going to ask me about him? Then I could have told her how much I’d missed him, how empty his house had felt, how I’d come home every night to my own little apartment and cried myself to sleep. I’d explain how he was back to texting little jokes, funny stuff but nothing serious, and how there was so much I thought we needed to discuss.“He hasn’t really talked to me about his dad, except to say that things are evolving fast.”

“Sophie had mentioned something about Ghregg Bates,” my sister said, finally taking the bait.

Sophie knew all about it. I’d called her, just like she was always doing to me, as soon as I’d heard Dion’s news regarding Ghregg’s imminent confession. She and my brother-in-law Granger had started to look into things and as I was driving over here, the press had caught on, too. They were reporting that there were rumors of a plea agreement in the Ghregg Bates case, and they also began to (correctly) share that several people currently under suspicion were going to be cleared. Maybe Carrington was right, though, and doubts would always surround her and her brother.

Nicola couldn’t speak about Carrington, but she did about Campbell when I voiced that concern. “People who know him won’t think that. They’ll know that he’s an honest and good person.”

“Do you really feel that way about him?”

“I really do.” She smoothed my hair a little. “I like how you’re letting it go a little wavy.”

“I got tired of straightening it.”

“It’s more like mine, so I approve,” she said. “You’re such a pretty girl.”

“You and Juliet are the prettiest. Or Grace or Addie, or Sophie.” They all were, in different ways.

“What? No, you are,” she told me.

She probably said the same thing to each of us, but it was nice to hear. “I’m going to try to act prettier and not to be a brat anymore,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it. That’s not a good way to deal with potential clients and I’m tired of hearing it from you guys. I don’t want to be that word.”

“You know that I love you, and so do the rest of us. Sometimes, yes, you have been a bit bratty,” my sister said. “But we all know the real Brenna, too, the one who dropped everything to plan a perfect wedding for Juliet and who sews all those beautiful baby clothes for your nieces. Other moms at the park are so jealous.”

“Really? They like my stuff?”

“Yes, but I was making a different point. We won’t call you that name anymore.”

“You can, if I’m acting that way,” I said. “I just won’t act that way. Mostly.”

“It sounds like a good idea.” She made a few more adjustments to my hair and then looked at her watch. “Have you checked your phone lately?”

“Um, no,” I said. “I don’t know where it is.” Nicola found it for me, and passed it over so that I could see a screen full of notifications. “Juliet has been texting a lot,” I said. “She’s telling me something about an emergency.”

“Oh, no!” Nic put her hands on her cheeks and opened her mouth wide.

I thought that her expression seemed weird, very weird. “What’s going on?” I wondered suspiciously.

“What do you need to do?” she asked. “Read your messages and find out.”

I looked at the phone again. “She’s telling me to go to the Russell House Hotel downtown. That’s where she and Beckett stayed the night before they went on their honeymoon.”

“It’s beautiful,” my big sister said.

“She gave me a room number…now she’s saying I have to get there quick, it’s real emergency.”

“Oh, no!” Nicola repeated, and she started to shove me toward the bedroom door.“You better drive fast.They have valets and you should leave your car with them.Don’t waste time circling around and looking for a spot.” She took my arm and marched me down the stairs.

“Nicola, stop!How do you know about the valets? Sophie and Grace are texting me too, that I have to get there, and now Patrick and Addie—what is going on?” I asked anxiously. “I have to change out of this gown and get going!”

“There’s no time!” she said. She was now practically carrying me out the front door, because she was shorter but still strong. She shoved my purse into my hands. “Go, Brenna. Go!”

I went, totally confused, and very overdressed for whatever was happening. On my way to the hotel, I called all my siblings and my parents but no one was answering, and Dion didn’t either when I called him to track down my mom. It wasn’t too far to the Russell House Hotel and I made it in record time, leaving my car with the valet like Nicola had told me to, and rushing through the lobby to the elevator. It went up to the seventh floor and I hurried to room seven-two-five, where Juliet had told me to go before she cut off all communication and left me totally in the dark. Was it Beckett? Was something wrong with him?

“Juliet!” I yelled, and pounded on the door. “JuJu! Open this right now!”

And the door did open, but it wasn’t my sister.

“What are you doing here?” Campbell asked me.

“Me? I’m meeting Juliet. I think,” I added. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m supposed to meet Beckett about another job.”

He did look very, very nice in the suit he had on. It had been a while since I’d seen him in one, and I had missed…wait a minute. “What is going on?” I demanded, and he took my arm and guided me into the room.

“I got back from Dallas this afternoon,” he told me. “Then I got several emails from Beckett telling me that it was extremely important that I come to the Russel House at seven o’clock. He said that it was an opportunity for my future that would…” He looked me over. “Wow. What are you wearing? You look so beautiful.”

“Thank you. It’s just a dress I made that I was trying on for Nicola,” I answered dismissively, but the way he was staring was turning me into a bit of a Brenna firefly, with a definite glow. “He wanted you to come to this hotel room about a job opportunity?”

Campbell looked away from me to check his phone. “I thought it was about a job. He wrote about my plans for the future and an opportunity he thought I shouldn’t miss, but no.He didn’t actually say anything about employment.He told me to pick up the key at the desk, that the room was under my name. Then he didn’t respond when I wrote back with questions but I thought that after everything he’s already done for me, I’d better show up.”

“Juliet said I had to get here, that it was an emergency,” I stated. “All my siblings were telling me to hurry to this hotel, that it was very important.”

We looked at each other, and he smiled. “They’re tricky,” he told me.

“They’re contrived.”

“Well, we’re here, and the room is in my name for tonight. There was already a bottle of champagne on ice when I came in.”

“I heard that’s good for anxiety.”

“Who told you that? A hockey player? You know, those guys guzzle it in the locker room before games.” He opened the bottle and poured out two glasses. “To Texas,” he said, and held up his glass.

“Did you get the job?” My emotions seemed to be split down the middle, wanting that for him but not for myself.

“I won’t know for a while but I thought it went well. There’s a bunch of crap going on that I should tell you, now that we’re face to face,” he said, and lost his smile.

“You mean about your dad’s confession? I already know,” I answered. “He’s going to cop to the whole thing and say that you and Carrington are innocent.”

“You already heard? I’m not exactly sure what he’s going to say, but it does seem like I’m in the clear from any criminal culpability. As of right now, I’ll be able to keep my house, too, and some of my savings. Apparently, the money I was making in my department was actually legitimate. We weren’t doing too badly, either.”

“Because you’re smart and capable,” I noted. And sweet, handsome, and wonderful. I held up my glass again. “Cheers.”

We drank and then he said, “I’ve spent so much time trying to get comfortable with the worst possible scenario, now it’s hard to believe that it won’t happen.”

“We would have gone to Laos or anywhere else with lint instead of money in our pockets, and that would have been fine,” I told him. “It would have been perfect for me.”

“Brenna…” He put down his glass, and also took mine from my hand and placed it on the table. “You can’t mean that. You would have taken off with me to a different country on the other side of the world, maybe never coming back? You didn’t even want to live in New York, and that’s only a short flight away.”

When I had lived there, returning home had meant a very long bus ride, but I understood what he was saying. “I do mean it. I would have missed everyone so much, but…”

“I didn’t want to get you involved in any of this,” Campbell said, and that was what Sophie’s husband had suggested, too. “Just when it seemed as if you might have liked me, my father was getting indicted.”

“I might have liked you?” I echoed. “You didn’t know how I felt?”

“Yeah, I did,” he answered. “From the moment you laid eyes on me, you thought I was an asshole. I guess I was, how I kept bothering you.”

“You weren’t bothering me. I waited to hear from you, hoping that I would. Wasn’t it obvious?”

“No, not to me. The first time we met, you looked at me like I was one of those gum sculptures. You were talking about the art and you were so smart and beautiful. Then you wouldn’t go out with me.”

“Well, I was scared,” I said, and I was admitting that to myself, too.

“Of me?” He pulled me into his arms, like when we were sleeping in somebody else’s bed. It was even better when both of us were fully awake, though. “Was it because you thought I was a hockey enforcer?”

“I heard that you yelled at your teammates during softball games and fought with people in the stands.”

“Funny that you believed we had spectators.” He took my chin, tilted it, and kissed me. “I don’t think I’m going to bring you down, not anymore.”

“You can bring me anywhere. We’re going to be fine,” I said.

Campbell kissed me again. I closed my eyes but I wasn’t pretending. This was all real.

“We should practice,” he mentioned. He reached down and took my hand.

“You mean more skating?”

“No, I signed us up for ballroom lessons. We can get our dancing in that way since there won’t be any weddings soon.”

I thought about Dion and Carrington, and decided I would keep that information for later.

“But in the future, if these skills are needed for a reception…” He looked down at my left hand, clasped in his. “Your sister Juliet said that you have ring requirements, and that I should check in with her.”

“She didn’t say that!”

“She did,” he confirmed. “Several of your sisters have been texting me since we got back from up north. All of your sisters and your brother, too,” he amended, “and Dion started this afternoon. He said that he forgives me and he also said that he’s in love with Carrington.”

“When you know, you know,” I quoted my adoptive brother.

“I knew after the fire. I kept thinking about those flames, and what would have happened if you hadn’t pulled us out. I kept thinking of you getting hurt and I dreamed about it, about trying to get to you. When we were up north, I was also asleep when I was touching you and—”

“We don’t need to talk about that.”

“I was dreaming about you then, too.” He rested my hand on his chest and pulled me against him, humming under his breath. He really had a terrible singing voice, but I loved it. I also loved when his other hand slipped lower, off my back and onto my butt. He started to return it to its proper place, but I reached around and made it stay put.

He laughed. “We’re going to cause a scene at our ballroom lessons if we dance like this.”

“I don’t care. I want to be close to you,” I told him, and I felt him draw in a breath.

“Brenna?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“I love you,” Campbell told me. “I love you.”

“You do?”

“I didn’t want to drag you down, but I can’t imagine going along without you. It’s just like Beckett said, that this is a gift. Everything that happened this year is ok with me, if I end up with you.”

“You can be with me. I love you, too,” I answered, and he kissed me again. We stopped dancing and got increasingly involved in that.

“Are you sewn into this dress?”

“There’s a zipper,” I answered breathlessly. “On the side.”

“Those are hard to set in this kind of fabric.”

“I basted it first. Oh…” He had unzipped and slid his hand inside. Nicola had told me to take off my bra, that she didn’t like seeing the straps. It had been good advice.

“I kept looking at you in your bikini, thinking about touching you here,” he said. My head had fallen back, so he bent and kissed my neck, and bit me gently, too.

I had started to throb, everywhere but mostly in one specific area. “You were looking?” I was already gasping.

“It’s no wonder I had so much…enthusiasm that morning. I don’t know how I thought I was going to sleep in a bed with you and not get enthusiastic.”

I reached down and felt the front of his pants. “Like this.”

“Holy shit. Yes.” Now he was breathing hard, too. It certainly didn’t seem as if he would stop and run away, claiming that he’d rather have rabies than sleep with me, but I wanted to make sure he understood the situation.

“Campbell, I’ve never been with anyone.”

“I have, but not ninety other people. That number is way, way off, no matter what Sophie counted up on social media,” he said. “And I haven’t ever been with someone I love, like how I love you. Also, I know about your dating history. Grace told me.”

“That little—”

He kissed me and the dress slid from my shoulders, but he stopped and carefully picked it up to drape over a chair. Holy Mary, could I have loved him any more? And thank goodness that Nicola had also told me to put on nice underwear today, which I hadn’t understood at the time. “Remember what grandma used to say about getting in a car accident,” she had reminded me, although as an ER nurse, she’d also previously told us that the condition of someone’s underwear was the least of their concern. But I’d listened to her and I’d worn some lace, and Campbell seemed to like it.

At least, he liked sliding his hands down into it, and I enjoyed that a lot. It seemed a little odd to be so naked while he wore so much, so I helped him out of his clothes, and the sight was even better than him in his bathing suit. Now I didn’t have to imagine, because he was right in front of my face—directly there as we lay in the bed and I slid down his body, examining everything I encountered. His chest was so nice to stroke, as were the muscles in his stomach.

“Brenna,” he said, and closed his eyes as I came face to face with his erection. He enjoyed it a lot when I stroked that, and when I tried out some stroking with my tongue, he moaned. I had made him moan!

Then he did that for me, too, when he lifted me up to splay across him so that my breasts were at the level of his mouth. He did things with his own tongue that were hard to fathom—the swirling and teasing sensations made me rock, pressing harder against him.

“Brenna.” His voice sounded husky and urgent. “I didn’t bring any condoms. I didn’t think—”

“I have some in my purse,” I answered breathlessly. “You never know. It’s like wearing your seat belt.”

He didn’t question that as he grabbed my bag, and when he returned, he got serious about inspecting my body, from gently brushing his lips over my eyelids and my ears, to pressing each of my palms against his cheeks. He took another close look at my breasts, with his eyes, hands, and mouth. He licked my hipbones, he kissed my insteps. Then he carefully bit my inner thigh so that I jerked in surprised pleasure, and that opened my legs to his eyes, and again, his hands and mouth.

I just couldn’t have imagined. No matter what I’d thought about this, no matter how I’d tried to fantasize, it didn’t compare to the waves of orgasm that made me shake and clench. Campbell turned onto his back and put me on top again, and then he gently eased inside me.

“Holy shit,” he said hoarsely. “Brenna…”

“I’m good,” I gasped. “It’s good.”

“Ready?” He moved and I did, too, on instinct. I sat up a little, and when I did, he held my breasts, thumbing over my nipples. That made it feel even better. When he touched my clitoris, my movements started to jerk and catch.

“Holy shit,” he said again, louder, and I came hard. Campbell arched, surging deep inside me, and so did he.

We tangled together in the bed in that nice room, where someone had done a great job of picking the drapery fabric. I lay with my eyes half-open and thought that it was perfect. “It’s perfect. Sometimes it is,” I said aloud.

“What?What’s perfect?”

Yes, the curtains were very nice, but I didn’t mean them. “There are just moments that are so good that I don’t want them to end. Like when you were eating the fudge that I held, and when you were just looking at me like...”

“Like I love you,” Campbell said. “I love you. It won’t always be perfect like that, not every moment, but it’s going to be good. It’s going to be very good between us, Brenna.” I smiled at him and he kissed me. “I’m so glad I drove by the gallery that day.”

I was so glad about everything, from my siblings’ interference, to the fact that I’d learned to sew zippers for easy clothing removal, to the advice that Dion had given me about carrying birth control. “We have our whole lives,” I said. “Isn’t that amazing? We have our whole lives to be happy together.”

And we were.