CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The garage bay empties slowly that night, members drifting home in twos and threes until it's just Gunnar locking up the last of the tools, Gilda humming softly to herself as she clears the remaining dishes, and finally, near midnight, just Thane and me alone at the long oak table, the string lights from the funeral gathering still strung along the rafters, dimmed now, casting everything in warm, low gold.
I sit in my chair, my actual chair, the nameplate gleaming faintly in the low light, and Thane pulls his own chair closer, angling it so we're facing each other instead of sitting at the formal distance the table's arrangement usually demands.
"How are you," he asks, quiet, direct, none of the careful management either of us used to bring to hard questions.
"Tired. Sad. Something else too, underneath all of it, that I don't fully have a word for yet." I turn my water glass slowly on the table, watching the light catch in it. "Relieved, maybe, though that feels like a strange thing to feel today."
"It's not strange." He reaches across the small distance between our chairs and takes my hand, thumb brushing slowly across my knuckles.
"You spent three years afraid of exactly this moment, or some version of it.
Coming home, facing what you'd left behind, finding out whether you'd survive it.
You did survive it, Niamh. More than survived it.
I think relief is exactly the right thing to feel. "
I let the words settle, testing them against the ache still sitting in my chest, and find that he's right, the two feelings aren't actually in conflict, grief and relief perfectly capable of occupying the same space inside a person at the same time.
"I keep thinking about something my dad said," I tell him. "That night, before the vote at the hospital. He said Everhart used to tease him about us. About how ridiculous we were being, dancing around each other for years before either of us admitted anything."
"That sounds exactly like something he'd say." A soft, sad laugh moves through Thane, equal parts grief and fondness. "He caught me looking at you more than once, back before any of this happened the first time. Told me I had about as much subtlety as a brick through a window."
"He wasn't wrong."
"No," Thane agrees, something warm settling into his expression. "He usually wasn't."
We sit quietly for a moment, the weight of the day settling into something gentler, and I find myself studying him in the low light, the new lines at the corners of his eyes, the steadiness that's replaced whatever recklessness he carried at twenty three, the whole shape of a man who's spent three years choosing duty over want and has finally, this past week, learned there was never actually a real choice between the two at all.
"I need to tell you something," he says, quieter now, something vulnerable moving across his face. "Not a confession this time. Just. Something true, that I want you to actually hear, plainly, without me hiding any of it behind duty or timing or what the club needs."
I wait, giving him the space he clearly needs to find the words.
"I'm not choosing you because the engagement ended, or because the club finally allows it, or because circumstances happened to line up this way.
" His grip on my hand tightens slightly.
"I'm choosing you because you're what I want, Niamh.
Just that, plainly, without anything else attached to it.
I've spent three years treating that want like something shameful, like admitting it meant failing everyone who was counting on me to put duty first. I'm done treating it that way.
I want you. I've wanted you since I was twenty years old and didn't have the first idea what to do about it, and I'm going to keep wanting you for as long as you'll let me, and I'm not going to apologize for that ever again. "
Something in my chest cracks open fully at the plain, unguarded honesty of it, three years of careful management finally, completely giving way, and I find myself matching his honesty with my own, the last piece of the truth I've never spoken all the way through to anyone, including myself.
"I need to tell you the rest of it too," I say, my voice steadier than I expect.
"Not just that I was with you that night.
The whole shape of what I've believed since.
That I thought wanting things, wanting you, wanting a life, wanting to be happy, was dangerous.
That every time I let myself want something for myself, it cost someone else something enormous.
I built an entire life around not wanting anything too much, because wanting felt like the thing that got Everhart killed.
I've been so careful, Thane. So relentlessly, exhaustingly careful, for three years, and I am so tired of being careful. "
"Then stop." He says it simply, like it really is that simple, like three years of complicated architecture could actually be dismantled with two plain words.
"Want things, Niamh. Want this. Want me.
I promise you, I am not going anywhere, and neither is this club, and neither is the truth we both finally know now, that none of it was ever your fault to begin with. "
I close the last of the distance between our chairs, and he meets me halfway, and the kiss that follows carries none of the urgency of the one in the rain outside the hospital, none of the desperate hunger of finally admitting something long denied.
This one is slow, certain, unhurried in the way that only comes from two people who've finally stopped managing each other and started simply choosing each other instead.
When we finally break apart, I glance down the length of the oak table, at my father's empty chair, at Everhart's old road captain patch that Gilda tells me will finally be given properly to whoever the club chooses next, at my own nameplate gleaming softly under the string lights, HARGROVE, restored, permanent, exactly where it was always meant to sit.
"I'm staying," I say, and I feel the truth of it settle into my bones as I say it, solid and certain in a way nothing has felt in three years.
"Not because of you, not only because of you.
Because this is mine, Thane. This table, this chair, this whole complicated, imperfect family.
I let myself believe for three years that I'd lost the right to it. I know now I never actually did."
"Good." He pulls me closer, resting his forehead against mine, both of us breathing the same warm, quiet air in the low light of the emptied garage bay. "Because I don't think either of us is very good at doing this alone anymore. I don't think we ever really were."
Outside, the last of the season's snow has finally stopped falling, the sky beyond the clubhouse windows clearing into something quiet and starlit, Halloway Bay settling into its late night hush the way it always has, patient, weathered, unchanged in all the ways that matter even as everything inside these walls has finally, completely changed.
I sit at the table where I used to belong, in the chair that never stopped waiting for me, beside the man who never stopped either, and for the first time in three years, I don't count anything at all. I just let myself, finally, simply, belong.