18. Jo
— ? —
Jo
Nick tells me everything.
We’re sitting on my couch, Rory asleep in his room, the city glittering beyond the windows. His hands are wrapped around a cup of coffee he hasn’t touched, and his voice is steady as he lays out the whole ugly truth.
He doesn’t soften any of it. He lays the whole thing out in that flat, steady voice, his own family included, and he doesn’t flinch from a single piece of it. None of it’s news to me by now. What undoes me is how much it costs him to say it out loud, and that he says it anyway.
And then, the offer. Step into Matthias’s place, make his mess vanish, and they would call off the war on me and Rory.
“I told them no,” Nick says. “I won’t cover for him. I won’t let them use you to buy my silence.”
The words keep coming, and somewhere in there I stop tracking the details. What lands is the rest of it. A family willing to set fire to a woman and a child to keep their name clean.
And Nick, standing alone against all of it. For me. For Rory.
For a long moment I don’t say anything at all. When the words come, they’re not the ones either of us expects.
“You went to them alone.”
He blinks. Whatever he braced for, it wasn’t this.
“You sat in that house and let them lay out a deal about my life, my son, our whole future, and you decided all of it by yourself. And then you drove here to tell me what you’d already chosen.” I wrap my arms around myself. “You hid the meeting. You didn’t even tell me they’d called.”
“I was protecting you. You have the custody fight, the lawyers, Rory. You had enough.”
“Don’t.” The word cracks out of me. “Don’t decide what I can carry. You’ve been hiring security and building files and fighting my war in rooms I’m not allowed into, and you call it protecting me, but from in here it feels like being managed. Like I’m one more thing you’ve got handled.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“It is. You don’t let me in, Nick. Not really.
You’ll throw your entire family on the fire for me, but you won’t tell me you’re scared.
You won’t tell me anything that costs you something.
You decide, and you handle, and you lock the soft parts up where nobody can use them.
” My voice breaks. “I know that move. I invented that move. And I am so tired of loving someone from the outside of a locked door.”
He goes very still. For a long moment the only sound is the city humming beyond the glass.
“My whole life,” he says finally, and his voice isn’t steady anymore, “the only thing that was ever safe was control. If I handled everything, if I never needed anyone, then no one could look at me the way my parents looked at me and decide I came up short.” He swallows hard.
“I don’t know how to do the other thing.
The letting-you-in thing. It feels like handing someone a knife and trusting them not to use it. ”
“Then hand me the knife.” The anger drains out of me all at once, and what’s left underneath is just the wanting.
“That’s the whole thing, Nick. You don’t get to save me from the outside while you lock me out of the inside.
I don’t need a bodyguard. I had to be my own for seven years.
I need a partner. I need you scared and human and here, not a wall standing between me and the weather. ”
His eyes are wet. I have never seen that before, not once.
“I’m scared,” he says, like the words are being pulled out by the root.
“I’m terrified. Of losing you. Of losing Rory.
Of becoming the kind of man who only knows how to control the people he loves, because that’s the only kind of man that house ever made.
” A breath. “I should have told you about the meeting. I should have asked you instead of deciding for you. I’m sorry.
I’ll be better. I want to be better, for you, for him. ”
It isn’t a grand speech. It’s halting and raw and it costs him visibly, and that’s exactly why it undoes me. This, finally, is the door coming open.
And then, because I’m still me, the fear floods back in to fill the space the anger left.
“But I’m still destroying your life.” It comes out small. “Your family. Your career. All of it, on fire, because of me.”
“You’re giving me everything I never knew I wanted.”
He’s close now, despite my attempt to keep him back. He catches the tears with his knuckles and waits me out.
“A family,” he says. “A real one. Not the cold, empty thing I grew up in. A son who thinks I’m a superhero because I do funny dinosaur voices. A woman who fights for the people she loves, who survived everything the world threw at her and came out stronger.”
“Nick...”
“You’re giving me a future, Jo. A reason to come home at night. Something worth fighting for.” His forehead drops to mine. “Don’t ask me to give that up. I can’t. I won’t.”
“You deserve better than this.” The words are barely a whisper. “Better than me.”
“There is nothing better than you.”
He kisses me. Desperate. Fierce. The kind of kiss that’s a declaration, a promise, an answer to every doubt.
“I love you,” he says, the words pressed into my skin. “I love Rory. I love the life we’re building. Don’t push me away. Please. I can’t...” His voice cracks. “I can’t lose you. Not now, not after everything.”
The arguments are still there, lined up and ready. All the reasons this is wrong, all the ways loving him will hurt him, all the evidence that Joanna Holland is nothing but bad luck wrapped in good intentions.
But God, I’m so tired.
So tired of being alone. So tired of carrying everything by myself. So tired of convincing myself that I don’t deserve good things, that happiness is for other people, that love is just another trap waiting to spring.
“I’m scared,” I whisper.
“I know. I am too.” He pulls me into his arms, solid and warm, and the resistance crumbles. “But we’re scared together. That’s the difference.”
“What if it’s not enough?”
“It will be.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I refuse to accept any other outcome.” He draws back far enough to hold my eyes, his own fierce. “We’re going to fight this, Jo. Side by side. And we’re going to win.”
“Nobody can promise that.”
“I can promise I’ll go down swinging.”
The laugh that works its way out is watery, broken, but real. “You’re impossible.”
“I’ve been told.”
I hold onto him without deciding to, arms wrapping around his waist, face pressing into his chest, letting myself be held for the first time in more years than I want to count. His heartbeat is steady under my ear, grounding.
“Don’t leave me,” I say.
“Never.”
“Even when it gets hard?”
“Especially then.”
“Even when your family tries to destroy us?”
“They can try.” His arms tighten. “They’ll fail.”
The night stretches on around them. The city hums outside. Rory sleeps peacefully in the next room, dreaming whatever dreams seven-year-olds dream, dinosaurs, probably, or superheroes, or the kind of uncomplicated joy that adults forget how to feel.
We stay wrapped around each other for hours without meaning to. The couch becomes a refuge, then a bed of sorts, tangled limbs and shared warmth and whispered conversations about everything and nothing.
When dawn finally breaks, pale light filtering through the curtains, exhaustion has given way to something else. Something that feels almost like hope.
“So what now?” I ask, my head still resting on his chest.
“Now we make a plan.”
“A plan for what?”
“For everything.” He shifts slightly, tilting my chin up so our eyes meet. “We fight for Rory together. And if it comes to it, we let the whole world see exactly what Matthias took and exactly who he is. I can prove all of it. We face my parents, the papers, whatever comes, together.”
“And if they don’t back down?”
“Then we go public. All of it. The threats, what they tried to do to Rory, the money he stole. Let the whole world see exactly who the Anderson family really is.”
“That would destroy them.”
“That’s their choice to make.” His jaw tightens. “I’ve given them an out. If they don’t take it, the consequences are on them.”
The plan is terrifying. The plan is also the first real hope that’s surfaced since this nightmare began.
“I don’t deserve you,” I say.
“Yes, you do.” He kisses my forehead. “You deserve everything. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you get it.”
“The rest of your life?”
“Too much?”
“No.” The word comes out surprisingly steady. “Not enough.”
He smiles, that rare, full smile I have learned to watch for. “Then we’re on the same page.”
Outside, the city is waking up. Another day beginning, full of challenges and battles and uncertainty. The custody fight is still grinding on. The Andersons could make their next move at any moment. The future is anything but certain.
But for the first time since this started, facing it doesn’t feel impossible.
Because we’re not alone anymore.
And that makes all the difference.