32. Vera
Sunday night, one week after coffee with Sloane, Kane makes dinner.
Not elaborate — pasta, something from what was already in the kitchen, the methodical sounds of him moving through his own space, water coming to boil, the rhythm of his knife against the board.
I sit on the counter and watch him the way I’ve learned to watch him, tracking the slight set of his shoulders when he’s managing something, the care with which he does even ordinary things, like chopping garlic is a problem that deserves his full attention.
The kitchen is quiet except for the city outside.
“You’re staring,” he says, without looking up.
“Occupational hazard.”
He glances over then. The look he gives me — assessing, present, the one that sees straight through whatever I’ve decided to show him — and I make myself hold it instead of looking away.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“Vera.”
I press my palms flat against the edge of the counter. The cool of the marble. The solid fact of it.
“She hasn’t called me.”
He doesn’t say anything — doesn’t rush to fill the silence with something that would help him more than me.
“What if she doesn’t?” I ask. “What if she gets there with you and she can’t get there with me? What if the coffee last week was the ceiling and not the floor?”
He crosses the kitchen to me. Stops close, not touching, just present.
“Then we figure out what that looks like,” he says. “And it won’t be what you’re afraid it is. You don’t lose her the way you’re imagining.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No. But I know her.” His voice is steady. “And she texted you.”
“She texted me coffee. Once. That’s not—“
“Vera.” He frames my face in both hands, the gesture that means look at me, all the way, and I do. “It cost her something to send it. You know it did. And she sent it anyway.” His thumbs still against my cheekbones. “That’s Sloane choosing. That’s what it looks like when she chooses.”
I look at him. The clarity in him when he’s certain about something. The way his certainty never tries to overwrite my reality — it sits alongside it, steady, like a fixed point I can orient by.
And then the other thing arrives, the one that’s been sitting just underneath everything for weeks, and before I can file it or manage it or decide whether it’s worth saying, it’s already out.
“Are we okay?”
He goes still. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” I stop. Try again. “I’ve been so inside the Sloane thing.
The fallout, the waiting, what I did, what it cost. And I keep thinking—“ I pause. The fear that’s been sitting underneath all of it, the one I’ve been not-looking-at for weeks, surfaces before I can stop it.
“I keep thinking about whether I’ve been too much.
Whether all of this — the guilt, the panic attacks, the crying on your kitchen floor — whether at some point you looked at everything I brought into your life and thought—“
“Vera—”
“Let me finish.” I hold his gaze even though it costs me.
“Damon used to say I was a lot to handle. That I never made anything easy. That someone who needed as much as I needed was always going to be exhausting.” I can hear how flat my voice has gone, the way it does when I’m saying something I’ve carried so long it’s lost its edges.
“And I’ve spent six months trying not to think about whether he was right.
About whether you’d eventually get there. To that conclusion.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “He was wrong,” he says in the same way he said it in the dungeon the first night, like there’s no version of reality in which this requires deliberation. “Every part of you that believed him is also wrong.”
“Kane—”
“I’m talking.” He holds my gaze. “You want to know what I see when I look at what the last six weeks have been? I see someone who was terrified of losing her best friend and couldn’t sleep and needed to be held and told me so.
I see someone who sat on my kitchen floor and fell apart and let me be there for it.
” A muscle shifts in his jaw. “That’s not too much, Vera.
That’s trust. You trusted me with the worst of it and that’s not a burden. That’s exactly what I want.”
My throat is tight.
“Damon wanted you smaller,” he says. “Quieter. Less. He called it too much because he didn’t have the range for it.
” His hands slide from my face to my shoulders and stay there, warm and certain.
“I have been waiting fourteen months for someone who could make me bring everything. You’re the only one who’s ever asked me to.
” He holds my gaze. “That’s not exhausting. That’s the point.”
The tears come before I can stop them.
“I keep waiting,” I whisper, “for you to get there. To the version of this where I’ve finally been too much.”
“I know.” He says it without flinching. “I’ve watched you waiting for it.” His thumbs press gently against my shoulders. “I’m not getting there. I want you to hear that not as reassurance but as fact. The parts of you Damon couldn’t hold are the parts I came looking for.”
I press my lips together. Look down. Look back up.
“I stopped checking,” I say. “Whether you were okay. Whether we were okay. Whether this has been something other than damage control for the last few weeks.”
“It hasn’t been damage control.” He says it without hesitation. “Not for me.”
“Even with all of it?”
“Especially with all of it.” He reaches for my hand.
Takes it. “When I sat outside Sloane’s building and didn’t go up — I wasn’t thinking about whether she and I would survive this.
I was also thinking about you. Whether you’d eaten.
Whether you were doing the thing where you tell yourself you’re fine when you’re not.
” His jaw tightens slightly. “The accounting doesn’t go away.
But it’s been background. You’ve been foreground.
You’ve been foreground since the beginning. ”
Warmth moves through my chest.
“I keep thinking,” I say quietly, “about the version of this where we don’t. Where we look at what it costs and decide it’s too much. I keep trying to think my way to that version.”
“And?”
“I can’t get there.” I meet his eyes. “There’s no version of any future I can actually want that doesn’t have you in it.” I let that sit between us. “Which is terrifying. Knowing something that clearly.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
“But I know it.”
“I know it too.”
I reach out and take his hand. Just that. His hand in mine in the kitchen light, the water simmering on the stove behind him, the city carrying on outside.
“I’m choosing this,” I say. “Not because everything is resolved or because the math works out. Because I would make the same choice again. Even knowing what it cost.”
He squeezes my hand once. “Me too.”
He says it simply, the way Kane says the things that matter most — without architecture, without qualification. Just the words. Just him.
We stay like that.
The water on the stove has gone very quiet.
“The pasta,” I say.
“It’s fine.”
“Kane, the water’s—“
“It’s fine.” He doesn’t move. His eyes don’t leave mine. “It can wait.”
I look at him. This man who is standing in his kitchen holding my hand like it’s the one thing he was sure of when everything else was shifting.
“Okay,” I say. “It can wait.”
Later, the pasta turns out slightly overcooked.
We eat it anyway. Knees touching at the kitchen island. The lamp on.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It’s terrible.”
“It’s fine.”
He looks at me sideways. “You’re being kind.”
“I’m being accurate.” I take another bite. “It’s fine. Some things don’t have to be perfect to be what they are.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
Then, so quietly I almost miss it: “No. They don’t.”
I reach under the island and find his knee. His hand covers mine without looking.
We finish dinner in a silence that doesn’t need anything from either of us.
Gerald sits on his shelf above the bar cart, small and stubborn and indifferent, the same as always.
I look at him on the way to the sink.
He looks back.
Behind me, Kane sets his fork down. The lamp makes everything warm.
Still here, he says, in the way cacti have of saying things.
Yeah, I think. Still here.