Chapter Nine
SOPHIA
I say goodnight not long after.
I’m not sure exactly what makes me stand up when I do. Some instinct that tells me it’s time.
Picking up my bottle, I say, “Goodnight, Tate.”
He looks up at me from his chair, firelight catching the angles of his face. “Goodnight, Soph. Sleep well.”
Crossing back to my room, I slide the glass door closed behind me, setting my bottle on the dresser and standing there for a moment in the quiet.
The night is still outside. The pool shimmers softly beyond the sliding doors, casting slow, shifting light across the wall beside me. Taking it in for a moment, I move to the nightstand.
The photograph catches my eye first—the photograph of Ryan, Tate, and me. I look at it for a beat before picking up the stack of books beside it.
It Ends With Us. Beautiful Disaster. The Notebook.
Turning each one over slowly, I read the back covers in the low lamplight.
The woman at the bookstore had clearly known her audience.
These were exactly the kind of books I would have chosen for myself once, without hesitation or a second thought.
I used to devour books like these and lose entire weekends to them, curled up on my couch in Vixen Falls with a coffee going cold on the table beside me, completely unreachable until I’d turned the last page.
Happily ever after feels different now, but not impossible. I’m not ready to believe that yet, but it isn’t as far away as it used to be. It’s like something seen from a distance rather than something you can simply reach out and take.
Running my fingers across the covers one more time, I set them back down. Then, I sit on the edge of the bed and look around the room properly, really looking at it the way I hadn’t been able to when Tate first showed me in, when everything was still too new and too much to absorb fully.
It’s a beautiful room. Simple, warm, and thoughtfully put together, not in the way of a hotel with all matching surfaces and impersonal comfort, but in the way some person had actually considered its design.
The soft bedding, a warm lamp, the chair angled just right toward the pool, and the sliding doors that let the outside in without asking anything of you.
He’d thought about this.
A motorcycle club president who cooked ribeye steaks, went to a bookstore, asked a stranger what women liked to read, and then came home and arranged it all on a nightstand for a woman he barely knew.
Because he promised his brother.
Pressing my lips together, I look at the ceiling.
Ryan, I think. I hope you know how much I loved you.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, and I know who it is before I look.
Mom.
A text, not a call, because Mom knows me well enough that if I’d wanted to talk, I would have called, and as late as it is, she isn’t going to push.
Mom: Just checking you arrived safely, darling. Call me tomorrow. Love you so much. x
I smile at the screen in the low light, and I type back.
Sophia: I’m here. I’m okay. The house is beautiful. Talk tomorrow. Love you. x
Watching the little delivered tick appear, I set the phone face down on the nightstand.
She’ll see it in the morning. She has probably been checking her phone every twenty minutes since I landed and will sleep better now knowing that a message is waiting for her.
That’s my mom. She never crowds you, but she’s always there, just close enough that you never have to wonder.
I know I’m lucky in that way. Luckier than I remember to be grateful most of the time.
Lying back on the bed, I let myself think about the evening. All of it, in order, from the beginning.
The dinner, dishes, the way I’d tried three wrong cupboards. That laugh in Tate’s kitchen at nearly ten o’clock was unguarded, and it surprised me. It was the first real laugh I’d had in longer than I can remember.
And the fire pit.
The stars above the desert.
The way Tate had sat in the night and said ‘He talked about you all the time,’ like it was simply the truth, and there was no particular reason not to say it.
‘She knows me. The real me. Not the patch.’
I press the back of my hand to my mouth and let myself cry properly, into the night, for the man who had said that and isn’t here to say it to my face.
For the love we’d had that I hadn’t known was that irreplaceable kind until it was already gone.
For every morning I’ve woken up since and reached for him in the half second before consciousness arrived and found nothing there.
I cry until there’s nothing left, and then I lie there in the stillness just breathing.
Ryan, I think. I miss you. I miss you every single day.
The night answers with silence.
Reaching over, I turn off the lamp.
In the dark, I watch the pool light move slowly across the ceiling. It’s pale blue and quiet until my eyes grow heavy, my thoughts begin to soften at the edges, and the evening finally lets me go.