EPILOGUE
Griffin
She was asleep before nine again.
I stood in the doorway of the bedroom and watched her for a long moment.
She was curled on her side, her hair spread across the pillow, one hand tucked under her cheek.
She looked younger when she slept. Softer.
Like all the weight she carried during the day had finally agreed to put itself down for a few hours.
She’d been doing this for two weeks. Falling asleep almost mid-sentence.
Leaving her nursing textbooks open on the kitchen table and her coffee half-finished beside them.
Keely did not leave coffee half finished.
In the two months since she’d moved into my cabin, she’d made it her personal mission to drain every pot I made down to the last drop.
I’d noticed other things too. The way she winced when she rolled onto her stomach in the mornings. The way she’d gone quiet at dinner last night when I’d cooked the chicken she usually asked for by name. The way her body had changed in ways so subtly she probably hadn’t registered them herself yet.
I had.
I’d spent years training myself to observe everything. To notice details others didn’t. To read a situation before it announced itself. That instinct had kept me alive in places that had wanted me dead.
I went to the bathroom and opened the cabinet under the sink. I’d picked up the test three days ago. I’d been waiting for the right moment even though I knew there wasn’t going to be a right moment. There was just going to be this.
I set it on the counter and went back to the bedroom.
“Keely.”
She stirred, her brows pulling together. “Mmm?”
“Wake up.”
One eye opened. “Do you need something?”
“I need you to come to the bathroom.”
Both eyes opened at that. She sat up slowly, pushing her hair back, reading my face the way she’d gotten good at over the past two months. She wasn’t going to find anything there. I’d made sure of that.
She followed me down the hall, her feet quiet on the floorboards, and stopped in the bathroom doorway when she saw what was on the counter.
The silence stretched.
“Griffin—”
“When did you last have your period?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. A frown appeared along with the slow, dawning realization of a woman who had been too busy holding the world together to notice the world shifted under her feet.
“I’ve been tired because of school,” she said. But her voice had lost its conviction halfway through the sentence.
“You left your coffee this morning.”
“I wasn’t thirsty.”
I picked up the test and held it out. “Take it, Keely.”
She took it from my hand without looking at me.
I stepped out and pulled the door closed and stood in the hallway with my back against the wall and my arms crossed and every carefully constructed argument I’d ever made about being too old and too damaged and too far gone roaring back to life in my chest all at once.
A baby.
I was thirty-five years old with scars on my body and ghosts in my head and hands that had done things I’d never be able to undo. I’d spent years telling myself I had no business wanting a life. Months reminding myself I had no business wanting her. And now—
The door opened.
She was standing there with the test in her hand, and her eyes were bright and wet. She wasn’t looking at me like the confident sassy waitress I’d fallen in love with. She was scared.
I looked at the test. Two lines.
The roaring in my chest instantly went silent.
I took her face in my hands, tilting it up to mine. She was holding herself very still, waiting. Still doing that thing she did where she braced for the weight before it landed, ready to carry it alone if she had to.
She wasn’t alone anymore. She had me.
“Griffin,” she whispered. “Say something.”
“You’re having my baby.” The words came out low and certain and so far from afraid that I almost didn’t recognize my own voice.
Her breath caught. “That’s—yes. That’s what the test says.”
“Good.” I pressed my forehead against hers, my hands sliding from her jaw to her neck, feeling the pulse jumping there. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“You’re not—” She pulled back enough to look at me. “You’re not scared?”
She was carrying my child. The thought landed with a finality that had nothing to do with accident or timing and everything to do with inevitability—like this was always where the road had been going, back when I was driving home from a wedding telling myself I had no business wanting anything at all.
She was mine. She’d been mine since the moment I’d first seen her, smiling and pouring coffee for strangers.
But this couldn’t be walked back. Couldn’t be talked away. Couldn’t be taken from me. That didn’t frighten me. It settled me—down into my bones, into the places the noise used to live—in a way nothing else ever had.
I thought about the desert. About fifteen months of lying in the dark, listening to the silence that never quiet was. About a twenty-three-year-old waitress who’d walked into all of that damage with her chin up and her eyes open and her sharp tongue ready.
“Terrified,” I said honestly. “Doesn’t change anything.”
She gave a half sob, half laugh and then she was in my arms, her face pressed against my chest and I held her. Tight and close.
She looked up at me, her eyes still wet, that smile breaking through that I hadn’t been able to resist since the first night she’d called me broody over lukewarm coffee.
“We’re having a baby, mountain man.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We are.”
I pulled her closer and held her there in the hallway of my cabin with the mountain dark outside.
I thought about every night I’d sat in that corner booth telling myself twelve years was too many. That the smartest thing I could do was finish my coffee and leave her alone.
I was glad I’d been bad at listening to myself.
I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and felt her settle against me—like this was exactly where she’d always been headed and she’d simply been waiting for me to figure that out.