Chapter Nineteen
Elena
The flight home was quiet, Marcus sleeping fitfully in the seat across the aisle, exhausted by nine years of vigilance finally allowed to rest, while Damon sat beside Elena with his head against the window, watching clouds pass beneath them, silent in the particular way of a man processing something too large to speak about yet.
"You've barely said anything since Lisbon," Elena said softly, taking his hand.
"I don't know what to say." His voice came out rough. "I spent nine years grieving a man who was alive the entire time, choosing exile to protect me. I don't know whether to be grateful or furious, and I think, right now, I'm both, in equal measure, and it's exhausting."
"You're allowed to be both," Elena said. "You don't have to resolve it today. You don't have to resolve it this year. You just have to let yourself feel whatever's actually there, instead of managing it into something more comfortable."
Damon turned to look at her, something soft moving through his face despite the exhaustion. "When did you get so wise about grief?"
"I lost my parents young," Elena said quietly.
"I spent years trying to feel the 'right' amount of sad about it — not too much, not too little, whatever version wouldn't scare the adults around me.
It took me a long time to learn that grief doesn't care about being convenient.
" She squeezed his hand. "Let yours be inconvenient, Damon. You've earned that."
He lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles, his eyes never leaving hers. "I keep thinking about how none of this — Marcus, the truth, any of it — would have surfaced if you hadn't walked into that glass office on your first day and refused to look away from me."
"I didn't refuse to look away," Elena said, smiling slightly despite everything. "I just decided you weren't as frightening as everyone said."
"I was," Damon said. "I think I still am, to most people. Just not to you."
"Good," Elena said. "I'd hate to be dating someone boring."
Something that hadn't quite existed before this trip broke loose in Damon's chest at that — a real laugh, startled and warm, the first one Elena had heard from him since she'd met him, and she understood, watching it transform his whole face, that she had just witnessed something rarer than any confession he'd made her yet.
Across the aisle, Marcus stirred, opening his eyes to find his brother laughing quietly beside a woman who was, unmistakably, holding his hand like she intended to keep holding it, and something in the older Castellan brother's exhausted face eased at the sight — the first small, unburdened peace he'd allowed himself in nine years.