Chapter Twenty-Five
Spring on the Curb
Weeks folded into a rhythm neither of them had known how to build before: Colt's new logistics work steady and unglamorous, coming home each evening with grease under his nails instead of bruises, walking through the studio's front door most nights like any ordinary husband stopping by his wife's workplace, no vigil required, no glass between them anymore.
The six-book contract delivered on schedule, the final files sent to Berlin on a gray Thursday morning that Senna marked not with the frantic relief of past deadlines but with a quiet, settled pride, Colt beside her at the studio when the confirmation email arrived, both of them raising mismatched mugs of coffee in a small, private toast.
Ledger visited on a Sunday in early spring, having formally begun his own exit from Eisenwolf with Colt's and Sabine's support, and the four of them, Ledger, Sabine, Colt, and Senna, shared an unforced dinner at the loft, the kind of evening that would have been unthinkable months earlier: easy conversation, real laughter, the found family the whole ordeal had somehow assembled out of its wreckage.
Sabine brought a lopsided cake she admitted, cheerfully, to having no talent for baking, and Ledger spent most of the meal describing his cousin's freight company in Mainz with the particular enthusiasm of a man who had finally let himself want something ordinary.
Senna watched Colt across the table, easy in a way she still sometimes had to remind herself wasn't fragile, wasn't a performance that might crack under scrutiny, and felt something settle in her chest that she'd stopped believing she'd ever feel again back in November, sitting alone on the floor of the sound booth with the whole city gone dark and cold around her.
"To getting out," Ledger said, raising his glass, and Colt clinked his against it, something unguarded and grateful in his expression that Senna had come to recognize as simply who he was now, without the old armor.
"To getting free," Sabine corrected, and they all drank to that instead.
? ? ?
On an evening in early April, the first genuinely mild evening of the year, Senna and Colt walked down to the studio's loading entrance together, the same spot where they'd first met three years earlier, where the men had cornered her months before, where their first kiss had happened with blood still on his face.
The ice that had gripped the cobblestones all winter was fully gone now, the Main running high and bright in the last of the evening light.
"Do you remember what you said to me, the first time I met you here," Senna asked, leaning against the same brick wall she'd been backed against months earlier, though the memory no longer carried any fear in it. "About the van blocking the entrance."
"I said I'd move it," Colt said, a small smile tugging at his mouth. "Then I came back the next day because I couldn't stop thinking about the woman directing a session through glass like she was conducting something sacred."
"You never told me that part."
"I'm telling you a lot of things now I never used to say.
" He turned to face her fully, something steady and unguarded in his expression, the particular quality of a man who had finally, completely, stopped hiding.
"I love you, Senna. I don't think I ever said those words to you properly, even before everything happened.
I said them the easy way, the way you say them because it's expected.
I want to say them now because I mean every part of what they actually cost to say honestly. "
Senna felt something in her chest open entirely, three years and one devastating winter distilled into this single, unguarded moment. "I love you too," she said, and for the first time since the confession at the kitchen table, neither of them retreated into silence or careful control afterward.
They simply stood together in the mild spring evening, the loading dock quiet around them, the city carrying on its ordinary business in the golden light, and let the words sit between them, uncomplicated, entirely true, the marriage no longer something either of them was fighting to survive or prove.
It was, Senna thought, watching Colt's face in the fading light, simply something they were choosing, together, again.