25. Nina
— ? —
Nina
Morrison doesn’t make us wait.
“It’s scar tissue,” she says. “The shadow. Exactly what we hoped it was.”
Cole doesn’t move. “Say the other thing.”
“Cole-”
“Morrison. You know the rule. Say it.”
She smiles - the real one, the one that doesn’t come out for seventy-percent conversations. “Remission. You’re in remission, Mr. Reeves.”
“Again.”
“Remission.”
He laughs, and the laugh cracks down the middle into something that isn’t laughter at all, and I hold my best friend in an oncology waiting room while somewhere behind us a stranger’s knitting needles pause, just for a moment, at the sound of somebody winning.
Outside on the sidewalk, Cole tips his face to the sun and keeps it there.
“Life’s short,” he says finally. “Even when it isn’t. Go do something reckless with your Friday, Castellano.”
So I do.
***
I invite him inside.
It’s deliberate this time. Not panic or grief or the aftermath of a crisis - just a decision, made with clear eyes and an open heart.
“Stay,” I say.
He goes very still on my porch, the harbor dark and quiet behind him.
We’ve just come back from dinner - our fourth date, or fifth, depending on whether the birthing class counts, which Cole insists it does - and he was already turning to leave.
Already doing the thing he’s done for months.
Delivering me home. Asking for nothing. Knocking, always knocking, at a door he used to have a key to.
“Are you sure?”
“No.” I smile. “But I’m not sure about anything anymore. And I’m tired of being careful.”
He steps inside.
And my pulse trips over itself, because there is no storm tonight. No blackout, no adrenaline, no crisis to blame this on in the morning. Just me, opening my own door, letting the man who broke me back into the life I built to prove I didn’t need him.
You shouldn’t want this, some last stubborn wall whispers. Not yet. Not him. Not after everything.
But I’ve spent months listening to that wall. Tonight I’m listening to the rest of me.
We start slowly.
Not because we have to - we’ve done this a thousand times before - but because something about tonight feels new. Like we’re meeting each other again for the first time.
His hands find my waist. My fingers trace the line of his jaw, the stubble he didn’t shave because I mentioned once, weeks ago, that I liked it, and he heard me, because he hears everything now.
“I’ve missed you,” he whispers.
“I know.”
“Not just this.” He gestures vaguely at the space between us. “All of it. Talking to you. Watching you laugh. Knowing what you’re thinking just from the way you hold your shoulders.”
“I haven’t been that hard to read lately.”
“No.” He leans his forehead against mine. “But I stopped looking. That’s on me.”
I pull back enough to meet his eyes.
“If we do this,” I say carefully, “it changes things.”
“I know.”
“Not just between us. In my head. In my heart.” I take a breath. “The cottage was supposed to prove I could survive without you. That I didn’t need the Moretti name or the Moretti money or any of it.”
“You proved that.”
“I know. But now I’m choosing to let you back in.” I touch his face. “And that’s scarier than anything else I’ve done.”
“I’ll earn it,” he says. “Every day. For as long as it takes.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I kiss him.
He makes a sound against my mouth - low, wrecked, months of patience breaking all at once - and his hands slide from my waist to my back, gathering me in, careful of the curve of my belly between us.
There’s no hurry in it. That’s the thing that undoes me.
The man who once couldn’t get me out of a dress fast enough is kissing me like we have decades.
Like he’s memorizing. Like this is the appointment he’s been showing up early for all along.
“Nina.” My name comes out of him like a confession.
“I know,” I whisper. “Me too.”
I take his hand and turn toward the bedroom, and he follows me the way he’s followed me for months - patiently, gratefully, one step behind and exactly where I want him-
Headlights sweep across the drive.
Adrian freezes. I freeze. Through the front window, a car is pulling up, an engine cutting off, a door opening with the cheerful slam of a man who has no idea what he’s interrupting.
“Oh God,” I whisper.
“Who-”
“Cole.” I’m already scrambling, yanking my cardigan back up over my shoulder. “He was going to drop off a crib gift tonight. I completely forgot.”
“You forgot?”
“I was distracted!”
“By what?”
“By YOU, you smug-” His knock echoes through the cottage, three jaunty raps, and we both go still as burglars in my own living room.
“Nina? You home?”
Adrian presses his hand over his mouth to stifle something - a laugh, maybe, or a groan of frustration deep enough to register on seismographs.
I’m shoving my arms into my sleeves, hair wrecked, lips swollen, looking exactly like what I am, which is a woman who was thirty seconds from dragging her estranged husband to bed.
“Coming!” I call, and my voice comes out an octave too high.
“Don’t,” Adrian whispers, strangled. “Don’t answer it. He’ll leave.”
“He’s dying, Adrian, I can’t just-”
“He’s in remission and he has terrible timing-”
“Shh!”
We stand frozen behind my own front door like teenagers, his chest against my back, his laugh shaking silently through both of us, while on the other side Cole hums to himself, sets something down on the porch boards with a thump, waits, knocks once more, and finally - finally - retreats down the steps.
His taillights disappear down the road.
“He’s gone,” I breathe.
Adrian appears over my shoulder in the window’s reflection, shirt buttoned wrong, hair a disaster of my own making.
“We hid behind your own door,” he says. “Like teenagers.”
“We’re ridiculous.”
“We’re happy.”
I lean back against him, watching the dark where Cole’s car vanished, and I realize he’s right.
For the first time in months, I’m actually happy.
“Now,” Adrian murmurs against my ear, and his voice has dropped into a register that raises every hair on my arms, “where were we?”
“You were following me.”
“I was.” His lips find the curve of my neck. “I’ve gotten very good at it. Following your lead.”
“Then keep up.”
I take his hand.
The bedroom door closes behind us.
***
Later, in the dark, with my head on his chest and his arm around me, his heartbeat slowing under my ear, I stare at the nightstand for a long moment.
Then I reach over and open the drawer.
“Nina?”
I don’t answer. I just find it by feel - the envelope, soft at the corners now from months of being touched and never opened again - and press it into his hands in the dark.
He goes still. “What is this?”
“Turn on the lamp.”
He does. The light is low and gold, and I watch his face as he turns the envelope over and reads the single line written on the back in my handwriting.
Ask me why I’m crying.
His breath leaves him all at once. He knows what it is. I told him, on the rocks, about the night that never happened - the osso buco, the rehearsal in the mirror, the envelope that’s been waiting in the dark drawer of the life I built without him.
His hands are shaking as he opens it. The ultrasound photo slides out into the lamplight - grainy, gray, eight weeks, a bean-shaped smudge that is now a person who kicks me in the ribs when I eat anything spicy.
He looks at it for a long time. Then he looks at me, and his eyes are wet, and he asks.
“Why are you crying?”
Because I am. Of course I am.
“Because I’m happy,” I tell him. “You can believe me this time.”
“I believe you.” His voice breaks in the middle of it. He pulls me into him, the photo held carefully above us like something sacred, and presses his mouth to my hair. “I believe you. I believe you. I’m never going to stop saying it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I trace patterns on his skin, and the last brick of the wall goes quietly into the sea. “Don’t make me regret believing you again.”
He’s quiet.
“I won’t,” he says finally. “I can’t promise I’ll be perfect. I can’t promise I won’t mess up. But I promise you this: I will never again make a decision about us without talking to you first. No suitcases. No assumptions. No stories in my head that don’t include your voice.”
And I do the most dangerous thing a woman can do.
I believe him.