Chapter 36
Hunter
Y ou know what’s funny?” Devyn asks as we walk side by side to the stables. I tell myself it’s to tend to the horses before bed and not because we have some serious shit to get through that doesn’t concern either of those kids in there.
Somehow, Devyn’s beauty only enhances when she’s mad, but I won’t tell her that. If I did, it would only distract me from what we need to talk about, because when her eyes go dark green like they are now, I willingly lose myself in them every damn time.
“What’s funny?” I follow her gaze to the stars, and we both smile when one shoots across the sky. “You have to make a wish before you answer that.”
“I wish we could go back in time,” she whispers, then laughs, letting her head hang low. Our eyes meet, and I want to tell her I want that, too .
But it would be a lie.
“Dev, I’m gonna tell you a lot of things tonight. And you might not like me afterward, so before we get into that, let me just say that I’m gonna be very honest with you. No more lies.”
She nods, watching me while I tug at my beard. God, why is this so hard? Fuckin’ vulnerability and shit. I fuckin’ hate it, but this has to happen, or…I can feel it in my gut.
She’ll run for good this time.
“I don’t wish we could go back. Not the way you do. And if this is going to work, you have to know that. None of this—” I wave my arms around the stables, rows and rows of horses people trust me to board. The best of the best in Pine Forest. “—the community, the scholarships, the town, Ellie …None of this would be here if I hadn’t lived the alternative first.”
If you didn’t leave me.
“The alternative?” she gasps, backing away, but I take her hand, holding on and praying to God she never makes me let go.
“When we lost her—” I pause, the words pricking my tongue like pins. “When you left, my heart shattered. But you have to understand, Dev. You were alive . And that’s all that mattered. If I could have gone back to that day and picked myself over our baby, if I could be the one trapped beneath the wreckage, I would have. And I let myself drown in that knowledge. What you don’t know is that…for the time you were gone, you were better off without me.”
Devyn lifts her chin, but she’s not shutting me out. She’s still listening.
“That same grief is what made me worthy of you again. To be worthy of what fate had in store for me with Eleanor. So, I don’t wish it never happened. I’d do it all again if it led me here. To her. And you.”
She blinks up through soft, rolling tears, and a sad smile falls into place. It’s one that tells me she understands.
I lean in and wipe her cheeks with my thumbs like she did to mine a month ago in this very barn, when she learned about a little girl she never got to love, but was raised in her image nonetheless. I cup her face in both hands.
“The only thing I want now is a second chance with you, Dev.”
Her pink-tipped fingers, fresh from a girls’ night manicure she had with Ellie, snap the hair tie on her wrist. She brushes me off lightly and shakes her head, sagging onto the bench and running her fingers through her hair before resting them on her lap.
“You say all that, but you make it seem as though you never fell out of love with me, like we were destined all along, but here’s the thing. I came back to visit…to talk about it, several times that next year, and you looked plenty over me then when you were getting under all of Lemon’s friends. You pushed me away, just like you’re pushing me away now.”
She tugs the hair tie again, snapping it twice this time.
“It feels the same, Hunter. I’m letting you in. I’ve rearranged my whole world to be with you. I’m even learning to parent a little girl who has the same name as a child we almost shared, a level-headed, brave, and perfectly beautiful young lady you’ve spent years raising on your own, but I am just now learning to love.”
She twirls around, looking at the barn, inspecting it like she’s seeing its intricacies for the first time.
“You say you want me to be your wife, but what I need to know, Hunter, is if you want me to be her mother. Because I don’t think I can be one and not the other.”
She swallows, twirling the hair tie around her wrist, and I hate myself for making her doubt her place. For causing her this worry. She sniffles, and my heart breaks as I stare into glossy, green eyes. “You’re a package deal, isn’t that what you said?”
Fuck.
“Dev, of course I want you to be her mother. You have no idea how much I want that. From the start, I—”
“Then what’s with the secrecy? What aren’t you telling me that has you all twisted up? And what has Garrison Presley got against a nine-year-old girl that makes you think he’d use a little playground scuttle against her? It’s her custody hearing, isn’t it?”
Really? I blink at her, exhaling quickly and pressing my lips together in disbelief. It’s uncanny, this woman’s ability to pull information from my brain like a damn siphon.
“I knew it,” she hisses, chewing her bottom lip. “What does Katie say? What are your chances? You know my dad can pull strings if you need him to talk to someone in—”
I cut her off. “No! I cannot ask your dad to help this time.”
“This time?” She inclines her head, arching a brow.
Shit.
“Look,” I hold my arms out to the sides, “this is part of the stuff I wanted to tell you about, but I had an order to it, and now it’s all mixed up. But fuck it, here we go.”
She eyes me suspiciously and settles back onto the bench as I pace across the stable, my boots kicking up straw and dirt as I go.
“After you left, your dad was afraid you’d come back when you turned eighteen, which we can now confirm he was right about.”
“Hunter, do not tell me that your ignoring me had something to do with my father,” she seethes, and I know she’s not going to like the rest of it, but I can’t change the truth.
“I needed help. I was…” I run my sweaty palms down the front of my pants as I think of how to word this. “I was sick, Dev. I was drinking straight through the night and into the next week, skipping work, cussin’ out anyone who’d hire me just so they’d turn around and throw me out like…” I exhale a heavy sigh and shake my head, finally speaking it for the first time. “Like the trash I thought I was.”
“But you still drink now. And you’re okay doing that?” I’m used to this question. I did stop drinking for years after my treatment, but that wasn’t the problem for me. I guess I’m lucky in that way. Garrison, not so much.
“Drinking wasn’t my addiction.” I swallow, unable to keep my gaze from darting to hers every few seconds to gage how she takes this in. “I did it, don’t get me wrong. But it was just pre-game for the main event.”
“Which was?”
“Fighting.”
“Fighting?” She scrunches her nose. “You mean like punching and kicking in little Speedos kinda fighting? You were addicted to fighting people?”
I shrug. “You make it sound like it’s not a thing, but it’s a thing, okay?” I grin at her. I have no idea how she can make talking about something I usually dread opening up to anyone about feel light, but she does. Something about that sweet little southern drawl she thinks she doesn’t have.
“I’m sorry. I just don’t understand, I guess. Was it dangerous, what you were doing?”
I nod.
“Underground fighting was taking over my life. I was intentionally throwing fights for money, a paid punching bag for guys twice, sometimes three times my size, so they could rise in the ranks. So I could take that same money and throw it into another fight and do it all over again. Some nights, I could get two or three fights in before I blacked out. I lived for the nights I was so black and blue that the pain seeped into my dreams. Because those nights, I wouldn’t dream about you… with a pole protruding from your bleeding womb.”
I huff, realizing how messed up that sounds out loud.
“I used to think of those as the good nights.”
Devyn squeezes my hand again, and I squeeze back to let her know I feel her. She doesn’t have the words, but she cares like nobody else ever has.
Except one.
“Your dad is the reason I’m not dead, Devyn. That’s the honest truth.”
“My dad? He’s always hated you.”
“Not enough to watch me waste away, I guess.”
She tilts her head, crossing her arms over her chest, and I can see the moment the pieces click together for her as I tell my story, one she’s long overdue to hear.
“You had been gone a few months. Samuel was in with some shady people, moving heavy amounts of product from the city.” I let out a deep exhale. It still shocks me what people will do for money. Power. Security…even my own brother. I swallow the grief, like always, and go on, noting Devyn’s fingers lingering closer to mine, our pinkies nearly touching. Her eyes shine; that’s how I know she feels the same things I feel. She knew Samuel. He isn’t just some blank-faced felon she can count off in her mind. No, like Dustin and a few others who grew up with Sam, Sammy back then, she understands. Probably asking herself the same question I have.
What went wrong?
Difference is, I’ve had time to think about this. I’ve had nine years to figure out that it’s all interconnected. We’re bigger than we think we are. Each one of us.
And when a community isn’t together, when people don’t build the world up for what they want to see it be, we have nothing.
Samuel had just that.
Nothing.
Except a felon father, a dead mother, and a brother who was drowning himself in grief.
I was his best hope. And I let him down.
I move my hand the final few inches it needs to trail my fingers across her knuckles, and when her eyes swipe up to mine, I lean in and kiss her, just once, before I face forward and prepare for battle.
That’s what telling this story feels like, a battle. One where nobody comes out unscathed at the end, fresh wounds opened and rubbed raw, each time the words leave my lips.
But our hands stay together, and when she squeezes once for I, twice for love, and three times for you, it feels easier to say what I need to. I’m not plagued with guilt and riddled with the fear of a grown man who’s lived and lost.
I’m a young boy, skipping along a stream, holding hands with the girl who reminds me of sunshine and makes me want to pick flowers for days, if it will only make her smile.
I want to marry this woman all over again.
I kiss her, wishing I could stop the story and lean into her, replacing the words that leave me with the taste of her sweet tongue against mine.
“I could taste you all night long,” I tell her, watching her chest turn pink in the moonlight that spills through the barn. “But you showed me your scars, and it’s time I revealed mine.”
I kiss her again, biting her bottom lip as I pull away, and she nods in understanding.
“One day, Sam was busted during a deal. He led a chase through some back roads connected to the interstate.” Devyn grips the edge of the bench, her eyes a mirror of mine, clouded with fear and sorrow. Wrapping her in my arms, I hold her tight, my chin resting atop her head as I stare forward, my own head projecting images across my mind of the night I didn’t see, but only know of because it’s fact.
There was a police report. A jury. Witnesses .
And a defendant who couldn’t possibly be my baby brother. I thought.
“He led the chase onto Garrison’s property, where his pregnant wife was working.”
Devyn’s hand curls around mine and squeezes.
“Samuel swerved, but the car behind him flipped into a shed, and the whole field went up in flames.”
“No,” Devyn gasps.
“Sam was okay,” I choke, but a sob starts at the base of my throat, hoarse and thick, the words a sticky tar, forcefully peeled from inside me.
“According to an officer who was pinned under his vehicle and later rescued, Annabelle Presley was alive, too, trapped beneath a wooden frame that splintered from the shed when it exploded.” My fingers dig into my own palm as I see it in my mind. Annabelle, beneath those wooden splinters, trapped like Devyn. And what followed…
My brother, Annabelle, flames.
I’ve gotta speak the words if I’m ever going to be free of them. To be sure they don’t wedge an even darker place between the woman I love and myself. So, I fucking do.
“Rather than save her,” I spit out, holding Devyn tighter for support, “Samuel used Annabelle’s last precious minutes to smash into his trunk and rescue six duffel bags of his precious product …one after the other after the other, until they were all laid in a neat, protected line outside the wreckage.”
I hang my head low, my voice barely a breath.
“Annabelle’s screams rang through the air.”
I loosen my hold on Devyn and exhale. My voice cracks.
“She burned alive.”
“Sammy?” she croaks through a cracked sob. “ Samuel?”
She can’t believe it any more than I could.
It’s still the truth.
“His girl was part of it. They planned to run off with whatever was left, but ended up arrested at a gas station later, two counties over.”
My teeth grind, my head shaking as I relive the hearing all over again. The images of Annabelle Presley’s scorched body on a fifty-two-inch projector.
Fuck! I slam my fist against the wall, not giving a shit about the pain, but summoning it. Wanting my fists to crack and bleed. But Devyn grabs my wrist and tightens her hold, cradling it until our fingers twine, and I meet her teary-eyed stare.
“That’s all Annabelle’s death bought them, fifty miles of getaway.” A sob rips from my throat, and I turn to face her. “How could he do that, Dev? Sammy.”
She pulls my head to her chest and holds it there for a moment as I breathe, keeping time with her heartbeat, steadying my own. I’ve never released this information to anyone before, and I can’t stop now. Not while I’m sharing with someone who knew the Sam I did.
“I have to keep going.” I sit up straight and brushing my face across my sleeve, the reassurance she provides being exactly what I need to get this out in the open and off my chest.
“Sam’s girl was arrested with him that day. At six months pregnant. That’s why Garrison resents her.”
His child died, while Samuel’s lived.
“Ellie,” she gasps, eyes wide with a new understanding of a reality that never should have been.
I nod, our eyes meeting squarely for the first time since I started the story.
“I became legal guardian to a newborn baby as a nineteen-year-old, with an addiction to fighting, gambling, and a one-bedroom rental by the tracks, Dev.”
“What did you do?”
“I called your father,” I admit, rubbing the back of my neck. “I didn’t know who else to call. He had money, resources, I don’t know. He was my fill-in father growing up. Nobody ever came to my career day, but your dad had no problem claiming both me and Dusty when he’d show up in our classroom. My boys, he’d call us. Until I got you pregnant, crashed that car…everything was my fault, Dev.” I turn back to her, shaking my head. “I know that. I’ve always known that.”
“Your fault?” She whirls on me. “Hunter, me getting pregnant was not your fault. In case you’re forgetting, I all but jumped you that day in the shed. The hearts carved on that weathered wood out back are proof of that. And the crash?” She shakes her head. “The other driver was drinking, for Christ’s sake. You can’t seriously blame yourself for someone else’s actions.”
“Don’t you? I should have swerved sooner. I could have—”
“You wouldn’t go back and change it, right? You said that yourself.” She lifts her chin, holding me hostage with her stare. “So, stop going back in your mind and blaming yourself.”
I take in her serious face, scrunched brow, pursed lips, and flushed cheeks, all lit by a glowing green gaze.
God, she’s beautiful.
I huff a solid gust of air, knocked in the gut by all that is Devyn Lynn Campbell.
“I’ll agree to anything you say because you’re so pretty,” I tell her, earning a swat to the chest. She stands to pace the floor, wiping her tear-soaked face across her sleeve.
“So, my dad helped you with Ellie, how? Got you a custody lawyer or something?
“Not exactly. Custody wasn’t on the table. The best Katie could do for us were long term foster care rights, providing Aunt Sarah act as a co-guardian, when she was still with us, which I took.
“Your father bought the farm. Told me he’d give it to me outright if I finished rehab for my—” I stop, blowing out a stream of air, but it’s okay. She sees me. She knows me.
“—my problems. There was this special family program for non-drug and alcohol related addictions. It was outside of town, but Katie fudged some details on the paperwork and your dad may or may not have paid the right people not to care.” I smile, a laugh even escaping me as I recall the yellow wallpaper peeling from the entryway. “It had dorms with kitchens, like a shelter, sort of. Ellie and I stayed there for a few months while your dad sent people to clear out the old barn and renovate it just enough to pass as livable by social service’s standards. Then, once he found out how low those standards actually were, he had a team of people come in to make it livable by Mr. Campbell standards.”
I chuckle, thinking about how he’d barely toured the first floor of the farmhouse with its caving ceilings and moisture damaged flooring before he snatched Ellie from the Pack ‘n Play and refused to let us stay there until his ‘people’ came by to fix the place.
Devyn smiles, and I realize she’s mimicking my own expression. This is the one part of the story that is somewhat laced with happy memories.
“He came to visit once or twice. Checked up on Ellie.”
Devyn’s eyes widen, and she stands, walking across the room. I stand, too, my voice carrying through the barn.
“Once Ellie and I moved in and fixed it up, we turned it into a real farm. I paid him back as soon as I could, but he had one caveat.”
“ You will not speak to my daughter. Ever again. Do you understand? If she comes to you, you will make it very apparent that you are no longer interested. Whatever you must do to convince her, you do it.”
I take a deep breath and dare to steal a glance at her. I step forward, taking her hands in case she tries to run.
I wouldn’t blame her.
“I was the caveat, wasn’t I?”
I don’t answer that. She already knows.
“Dev, I never wanted to keep secrets from you, but there’s more to this. And now that we’re being open about everything, there’s more to tell you that I—”
Her lips crash against mine, arms wrap around my neck, her tongue snakes its way into my mouth and tangles with mine. I think she’s claiming me, and that makes about as much sense as tits on a bull, because it dawns on me, as I stand here opening myself to her completely, that for the last ten years I’ve done nothing but lie to the woman I desperately love.
A woman I don’t deserve to feel in my arms, her curves pressing against my body, her hands slipping under my shirt.
Fuck.
But then she pulls her face away, lowering off her tiptoes and resting her cheek against my shoulder. My arms automatically wrap tighter around her.
“All this time, I thought you stopped loving me,” she says, pressing close.
“I could never stop loving you.”
I kiss her again, savoring this goddess of a woman who stands here before me while I lay myself bare to her, and still sees me as the man she did before.
“But there’s more. Since coming back—”
“You don’t have to tell me everything right this second, Hunter, but thank you for finally letting me in.”
She looks up at me, then, worrying at her hair tie.
“Wait, that time I came back, and you were with those Valley High girls?”
“I didn’t have sex with them,” I admit to her in a rush. I’ve hated letting her think that for years, and I’ll never forget the hurt in her eyes when she opened the door and I let her believe she was replaceable.
The truth is nobody could ever replace Devyn Lynn Campbell. Not in my bed and never in my heart.
“I wanted to tell you about rehab and Ellie, everything. The second time you came back, I tried. I had almost worked up the courage to come clean about your dad, about the lies or the fact that I hadn’t been with anyone but you, since you. But you took one look at me having drinks with Lem and Katie at the Sugar Stable, and you were back in the city the next day. You never came back after that, Dev.”
The moonlight spills in from the barn doors and illuminates her from behind. Like she’s an angel. She’s been gone so long, when I first saw her on that street corner, I thought she might be. Much too beautiful to be a ghost from my past, but an angel? They’re eternal. Just like Dev.
“I thought you’d never come back to Pine Forest.”
She looks down, and I tilt her chin back up to look at me. “I don’t blame you for that either, Dev. I figured you were happy in the city. You were Miss American Rodeo, for fuck’s sake. You were on the news every morning with a bright, beautiful smile on your face and in the tabloids at parties having fun like you’re supposed to in your twenties, not raising a child and fighting an addiction like I was. You were better off without me.”
“No,” she says, laughing into my shirt and…
“Are you smelling me?” I smile.
“Yes,” she says, sighing wistfully. “It’s just, we both thought we were fine without each other all those years, but it’s only because we were convincing ourselves the other person was better off without us. Neither of us wanted that. You don’t find that funny?”
“No, I find it depressing.”
“But what about Ellie’s custody?” Devyn suddenly remembers, and I groan. There’s still a lot to talk about, and that kiss earlier made me want to do anything but talk.
But this is life. This is adulting and this is partnership, and this is…our relationship. A relationship that, up until two months ago, I didn’t even think stood a chance of existing. My lips curve into an undeniable smile as I mull that thought over. The thought of a relationship with this woman. As my wife.
I steer us back to the bench, and we go over the cow story. I smile at Ellie’s bravery, her ability to stand up to her bully and hold strong to her morals. I couldn’t be a prouder papa, even if she did throw the first punch. We’ll work on that.
I explain to Devyn the ins and outs of our custody issues, never realizing how freeing it would feel to have someone to share these burdens with.
And we have our fair share.
I curl my lip in disgust even thinking about the woman we’ll have to deal with at the next hearing.
“Her bio mother only wants her for her inheritance. Every one of us kids got something from Aunt Sarah when she passed last year, and since Samuel’s sentencing has been extended to life, Ellie gets twice as much. Hers and Samuel’s.”
Devyn nods in understanding, but pauses, scratching her head. “If it’s Ellie’s inheritance, how would her mother even be able to use it? Even with custody, it’s still pretty strict.”
“That won’t stop her.” I shake my head angrily. “She’ll find a way. Regardless, I can’t let her become responsible for Ellie.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”
She stands, twisting the hair tie on her wrist in circles.
“Ellie said if we were for real married, you’d have a better shot at getting full custody. Is that true?”
I wince. This is where I was headed next, but telling her feels like it could break this new understanding we have. Still, the truth is what we need. I know that now.
“Devyn, the day after Truth or Dare, I found out that Lemon wasn’t very honest with us. She played the part of wedding officiant so well in the TikTok video because she is a wedding officiant.”
Her eyes pop open wide, but she’s not angry with me. It’s the exact opposite as her grin forms, stretching to meet her eyes.
“You’re smiling.” I shake my head in disbelief. “I thought for sure you’d be mad, but you gotta understand, Dev, I wasn’t trying to lie, I just…needed more time.”
“Time for what?” she asks, hands on her hips, every bit the sassy little cowgirl I fell in love with all those years ago.
I take a step closer. And then another. Until we’re face to face again.
“Time to make you fall in love. With both of us,” I add. “I was worried you’d run if it felt too permanent, not just with me, but with Ellie specifically.”
“Run?” She laughs. “Hunter Isaac, I’m never running from you again. There’s too much FOMO going on from the one decade apart for me to even consider ever leaving. I swear to God, if I go in one more store and see your face hung on the wall like a damn saint, I’ll barf.”
A laugh breaks free of my face and tumbles around her own as she wags a finger at me.
“No, you’ve done enough for this town. It’s my turn to be the center of everyone’s attention in Pine Forest.” She winks, twisting her lips into that duckface I love to kiss right off, and a smile spreads across my own face at that. At her ability to crack a joke and lighten even the most serious of moments.
“So, you’ll stay ‘ for real married’ to me, then?”
“Do you dare me?” she teases.
“Fuck, babygirl, I’ll beg if that’s what it takes.”
She considers that for a moment, chewing her bottom lip and tapping her chin to fuck with me. And God, that part of her has always turned me on.
She leans closer, and I can smell her lip gloss. I love that I know what it tastes like already, vanilla cupcakes, but I still lick every bit of it from her face when she presses her lips to mine. I devour them, my tongue diving in when her lips part for me, claiming the spaces around her breathless moans. We pull apart, and I watch her blushing chest heave up and down as a smile curves over her lips, wet and bruised from my kiss, breathless and breathtaking all at once.
“Okay then, husband, I’ll be for real married to you.”
She grins, while happiness and relief consume me. I take my woman in my arms and swing her around before setting her back on her feet and pulling a piece of paper from my pocket.
“This is the certificate Lemon left for us. We just need to file it with the court, and it’s official. Although it hasn’t stopped me from using it as leverage against Catherine, Ellie’s bio mom. She doesn’t know it’s not filed yet.”
“I get it now, why you were worried about the fight. If Garrison wants to press this up the ladder with his uncle, that can’t be good in the family courts with Judge Owens presiding. They’re practically best friends, Mayor Presley and him. But it didn’t seem like Garrison was as concerned with Jonathan’s eyes and lip as he was with…Annabelle?”
“Yeah.” She’s right. “He needs help. He was in rehab with me, but he never stuck with it. We had a class together…grief and loss…he was my… fuck, we bonded over losing an unborn child. He was my friend, Dev.” I flick my gaze to hers and see the same sadness, a sympathy we both share with Garrison. “But he’s so twisted with his own grief he lets it out on his animals, on his farm, he resents anything to do with Pine Forest because none of it matters without her. It was her dream, his farm, and he hasn’t tended to the fire-fields since she died. Doesn’t seem he’s tended to his kid, either.” I frown. “His mentality altogether is…self-destructive.” I sigh heavily, my own realization sinking in.
“Maybe you can help him,” she says, snapping the band again.
“Why do you do that? Snap that thing on your wrist?” She stops, her lips forming a small “O” shape, like maybe she didn’t think I’d noticed this habit. It’s cute she thinks I’d miss anything about her, as if she’s unremarkable in any way.
“It’s a therapy technique I was given after the crash,” she says, inspecting the frayed, black elastic around her arm.
“When my mind fills with things that seem uncontrollable and crippling, I snap this. It gives me back some of the control. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like my mind focuses on the sting because I told it to, and not on the things I obsess over.”
“They taught you to shock therapy yourself in counseling?”
“Um, I guess you could call it that,” she says, chewing her bottom lip.
So often I find myself jealous of this woman’s teeth for their proximity to her mouth, and I can’t control it any more than I can the weather. I reach out and run my thumb along her bottom lip, popping it free of her bite.
“I want to suck on this,” I say, and I feel the breath leave her lips as she gasps. “Can I?”
“Yes,” she says, her gaze wandering to the mounted rack along the stable wall that holds rows of thick farming ropes, and my smile widens.
“I want to show you something that requires full honesty and trust for both of us.”
She eyes me cautiously, like prey.
And fuck if I don’t like it.
I come to life around Devyn. The things I want to do to her body are as sinful as they are endless. But I’ll ask for forgiveness another day.
I reach out, tweaking her nipples through the fabric of her shirt. She lets out a sexy little sigh, and my cock instantly grows in response. I roll my thumbs along the hardened points until she drops her head, pleading for more of my touch, and I take advantage of what she offers as she arches her body back into my hold.
She tastes like oranges, as I kiss her bare collarbone, sucking and licking the skin as she moans my name. I pull away, watching the skin across her chest react to where I sucked in soft red welts, and I shoot my gaze back to the ropes lining my walls and groan, imaging how perfect she’ll look, wrapped up and coming all over my finger, binds pressed tightly against her soft flesh, as she takes her pleasure from me.
Fucking beautiful.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
“I do.”