Chapter 14
Sloane
I stood in front of my closet like it held the answers to questions I didn't know how to ask.
It's just Garrett. You know him. You've known him for ten years.
But that was exactly why my hands were shaking. This wasn't a first date with a stranger, the kind where you could show up as any version of yourself and see what stuck. This was a second chance with the love of my life.
The stakes weren't higher, they were everything.
I pulled out a dress, considered it, put it back. Too casual. Another one. Too trying-too-hard. A third. Too much like a work event.
Wear something nice.
What did nice even mean after confessions that cracked me open and a night that put me back together? After waking up in his arms feeling whole for the first time in years?
I closed my eyes. Breathed.
Garrett at my door when I was falling apart. The way he'd held me without questions, without demands. The moment I'd finally told him everything, the depression, the silence, the years I couldn't take back.
And he hadn't walked away.
I still love you.
And then we'd stopped talking. Found other ways to communicate.
His hands. His mouth. The weight of his body saying things words couldn't capture.
I'd fallen asleep in his arms and woken up believing, for the first time in years, that maybe I deserved to be happy.
I opened my eyes. Reached for a dress I'd bought two years ago and never worn, deep green silk, simple cut, the kind of thing that looked effortless but cost more than I'd ever admit. An impulse purchase after a particularly good story broke.
I'd told myself I was saving it for a special occasion.
This was the occasion.
I showered. Did my hair—down for once, the way Garrett always used to like it. Light makeup. A touch of perfume at my wrists and throat.
And then I opened my jewelry box.
The earrings were still there. Small diamonds in simple settings, the kind of understated elegance I'd never been able to afford myself. He'd given them to me for my twenty-third birthday, three months before the engagement. I'd worn them almost every day for two years.
I hadn't thrown them away. Hadn't been able to. They'd moved with me to DC, then back to New York, sitting in the bottom of my jewelry box like a secret I kept from myself.
I put them on.
The woman in the mirror looked like someone I hadn't been in a long time.
Someone who'd said yes without hesitating when he'd dropped to one knee on a Brooklyn rooftop, the city sprawled out behind him, a ring box in his shaking hands, the words tumbling out like he'd been holding them in for months.
I'd said yes before he finished asking.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached past the jewelry box to the back of the drawer.
Velvet under my fingertips.
The ring box was smaller than I remembered. Navy blue, slightly worn at the corners.
I opened it.
The diamond caught the light. Small but clear. The band still bright, untouched by eight years in the dark.
He'd never asked for it back. In all the silence between us, the unanswered letters, the years of nothing, he'd never once asked me to return it.
Maybe he'd written it off. Maybe he'd forgotten.
Or maybe, like me, he couldn't bring himself to make it that final.
I closed the box. Set it on the dresser where I could see it.
I knew what to do with it now.
He knocked at six-fifty. Ten minutes early.
I opened the door.
Sunflowers in his hand. Button-down in pale blue, sleeves rolled to his elbows, dark jeans that fit him perfectly. That devastating half-smile that had undone me when I was twenty-two and still undid me now.
I stopped breathing.
"You remembered."
"I remember everything." He closed the distance between us, one hand sliding to the small of my back, and kissed me. Soft. Unhurried. Like we had all the time in the world.
When he pulled back, his eyes moved over my face. "You look beautiful."
I took the sunflowers. Breathed them in. After eight years, he'd remembered that I thought roses were cliché and sunflowers were hope.
"You look—" I shook my head. "You look like every dream I was afraid to have."
He laughed. Low, warm, the sound settling somewhere beneath my ribs. "Ready?"
"Let me put these in water."
I found a glass, I didn't own a vase, which said something about the state of my life, and set the sunflowers on the counter. Their bright yellow faces leaned toward the window.
When I turned back, Garrett was watching me from the doorway with an expression that made my chest ache.
"What?"
"Nothing." But it wasn't nothing. The same look he'd had on the rooftop the night he proposed. The look that said I can't believe you're real.
He took my hand. Led me out.
The restaurant was a fifteen-minute walk. He'd chosen somewhere on foot, which meant night air and his arm against mine and the kind of city wandering we used to do before everything fell apart.
I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it. The rhythm of walking beside him, our strides falling into sync without either of us trying.
The place was everything I would have chosen. Warm lighting. Exposed brick. Intimate tables tucked into corners. The kind of place that felt like a secret.
"I mentioned this place once," I said as the host led us to our table. "Years ago, we walked past it on the way to that terrible movie you made me see—"
"It wasn't terrible."
"It was objectively terrible. The plot made no sense, and the lead actor kept doing this thing with his eyebrows—"
"I remember the eyebrows."
"But I said the restaurant looked nice. Just once. Passing by."
Garrett held my chair for me. Old-fashioned, something his father had probably taught him. Something that made my heart squeeze.
"I told you." He sat across from me. "Everything."
We ordered wine. Appetizers. Things that required decisions I couldn't quite focus on, because I was too busy watching the way the candlelight played across his face, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled.
The conversation flowed like water finding its level. He told me about the call that almost made him quit, a building collapse, two hours trapped. I told him about the story that almost got me fired, a corruption investigation where I'd pushed too hard, too fast.
We talked about the case. Rebecca Marsh. The danger still lurking at the edges of everything we'd rebuilt.
Even that felt manageable with his hand reaching across the table to hold mine.
"I'm happy," I said, the words surprising me as they came out.
Garrett's thumb traced circles on my palm. "Yeah?"
"Really happy." I shook my head, laughing at myself. "I almost forgot what it felt like. I'd gotten so used to functioning. Getting through days. Achieving things that looked like happiness from the outside."
"And now?"
"Now I feel like I'm actually inside my life instead of watching it happen to someone else." I met his eyes. "You did that."
"We did that." He lifted my hand, kissed my knuckles. "Together."
Dinner came and went. Dessert, something chocolate I barely tasted. The restaurant emptied around us, but we stayed. Talking. Laughing. Rediscovering each other in the space between words.
"We should go," Garrett finally said, glancing at the patient waiter. "Before they call the cops on us for loitering."
"They wouldn't dare. I'm a journalist. I have connections."
"Terrifying." He grinned. "Let me get the check."
"I can—"
"Sloane." He said my name the way he always had, like it meant something important. "Let me do this. Please."
I let him do it.
We walked through Brooklyn.
The night had turned cool, that particular crisp that settled over New York in autumn. I'd left my jacket at the restaurant. Probably on purpose.
"I used to walk these streets and think about you." Our fingers laced together, his palm warm against mine. "After I came back. I'd wander at night, too restless to sleep, wondering if you were happy. If you ever thought about me."
"I thought about you every day." Quiet. Honest. "Read every article you published. Kept them in a stack on my coffee table."
The first night I'd come to his apartment to work the case. The stack of newspapers under his coffee table that I'd assumed was research. My own byline staring up from the top of the pile.
I'd pretended not to notice.
"All of them." He stopped, turning to face me. The streetlight caught the gray-blue of his eyes. "The housing discrimination series. The foster system exposé. The Lang investigation. Everything."
"Why?"
"Because they were you." Simple. Like it was obvious. "Reading them was the only way I could still... know you. See who you were becoming."
Something cracked open in my chest. All those years I'd been convinced he'd moved on, that I was nothing but a bad memory, and he'd been collecting pieces of me. Holding onto whatever fragments he could find.
"I love you."
The words came out fierce. Certain. Not the soft confession of before, wrapped in tears and apologies.
This was a declaration.
"I should have said it five years ago when I saw you with that woman and walked away instead of fighting for you." I stepped closer. "I love you, Garrett. I've loved you since I was twenty-two, and I'm not going to be afraid of it anymore."
He cupped my face in his hands. Calloused palms, rough from years of gripping hose and climbing ladders, gentle now against my cheeks.
"You're saying it now." His voice was rough. "That's what matters."
He kissed me on a Brooklyn street corner.
And I finally understood what coming home meant.
It wasn't a place. It wasn't four walls and a roof and an address you could write on an envelope.
It was this. His mouth on mine. His hands in my hair. The feeling of being known completely and loved anyway.
Home was a person.
Home was him.
We didn't make it past the hallway.
The apartment door barely closed behind us before I was reaching for him—his shirt, his belt, any part of him I could touch. His mouth found my throat, and I gasped, arching into him.
"Bedroom," I managed.
"Yeah."