Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
CALEB
Eight hours.
I’ve been counting them, which means my brain is already betraying me, but in the best possible way—because it’s been eight hours with Harper truly back in my arms, all her walls crumbled to rubble.
Her hunger for me is as unmistakable as mine always was for her, and eight uninterrupted hours with her is the best thing that has ever happened to me. And at the same time, still nowhere near enough.
I’ve lost count of how many times we made love last night. That detail I actually let go of, somewhere around round three, when my brain finally shut the hell up for the first time in approximately a decade.
First in the hot tub. Then in the shower after we stumbled back to her room, laughing and dripping all over each other.
Then again, in bed, after I made the creative executive decision that towel-drying her was going to take considerably longer than it might usually, since I couldn’t keep my hands off her.
We slept—really slept, the deep, dreamless kind I haven’t been able to access in years without the help of melatonin—and then her weight was on top of me at dawn, her hair spilling everywhere, her hips finding mine like she had no intention of letting us make it to sunrise without me inside her one more time.
She said the words I’d waited ten years to hear, over and over.
I love you, Caleb.
I’ve been replaying them on a loop.
And okay, that’s the OCD brain doing what it does, turning something beautiful into a groove. For once, I’m just letting it.
Some grooves deserve to go deep.
I’m not counting breaths or calculating primes or cataloging the angle of the sunlight through the curtains.
I’m just listening to the playback.
I love you, Caleb.
Again.
I love you, Caleb.
Let the replay run.
Harper’s still asleep when the light goes golden and full, sprawled on her stomach with her hair obscuring half her face, one arm flung out toward me like even unconscious she’s checking to make sure I haven’t disappeared.
I haven’t. Nor do I have any intention of doing so. I’m lying here watching her breathe, which probably qualifies as unsettling to any reasonable person. But I’ve never been entirely reasonable when it comes to Harper. I’ve made my peace with that.
I let her sleep and I think about our son instead, which is still a phrase my brain hasn’t fully processed. It feels so enormous.
Our son.
With every hour I spend with him, the terror recedes a fraction and something else moves in to take its place. There’s such a lightness in my chest it feels like a balloon trying to lift me up off the bed.
Harper wakes up slowly.
Which I know because I’ve been watching the process of shifting light on her skin for about twenty minutes.
It’s warming toward gold now that it’s midmorning—and Harper has been surfacing through it in stages, one small eye twitch at a time.
A deeper breath.
Her fingers curling against the pillow.
The slight furrow between her brows going soft again as whatever dream she was having releases her.
She finally blinks open her eyes and finds me already there, and it’s a moment I love—the exact half-second before she fully orients, when her expression is just open. Nothing protecting it. Just her face, unguarded, eyes meeting mine.
Then she fully wakes up, and something shifts. Like she ran the calculation in the night and came out somewhere new.
“Hi,” she says, eyes soft.
Fuck. It guts me when she looks at me that way.
“Hi.”
She studies me for a moment. I let her. It’s only fair since I’ve been unabashedly staring at her.
“You’ve been awake for a while,” she says. Not a question.
“Little while.”
“Creep.”
“Little bit,” I don’t disagree.
The corners of her mouth pull. She reaches out and her fingers find the center of my chest—not a reach for me exactly, just a landing. The way a hand comes down somewhere to confirm it’s solid.
Her palm is warm and I feel my heartbeat adjust under it, steady and a little stupid with how happy I am for the touch.
She’s quiet for a moment and so am I. But it’s nothing like the silences we used to have—the ones strung tight with everything unsaid, every rule we were supposed to be following but instead were breaking.
This one has room in it. I don’t feel the need to count anything or fill it or to make it make sense. It just is.
“Your hair,” she says, reaching up with her other hand, her smile deepening. I have no idea what state it’s in. I don’t care at all.
“Is it terrible?”
“It’s a disaster.” She sounds delighted about it. She combs through it with her fingers, unhurried, and I feel that specific pleasure move down the back of my neck, the kind that makes your eyelids heavy.
“You look like a normal person,” she says.
“Devastating.”
She laughs—quiet, real, just air through her nose—and keeps doing it, smoothing my hair back like she’s got nothing else to do and nowhere to be.
Maybe for this hour, we don’t. Maybe this is the one hour the world is going to leave us alone, and I’m going to spend every second of it memorizing the exact temperature of her hand and the exact shade of her eyes in this light.
In this light they’re this translucent green, with little magical golden dots surrounding the iris.
I should have had years by now to map the constellation of each golden speck.
I reach out and tuck a piece of her hair back from her face—just because it’s there, just because I can—and she lets me, her eyes on mine.
“Last night,” she starts, then stops.
“Yeah,” I grin, because I know what she means without her finishing the sentence. Last night was its own category of thing. The kind that reorganizes your sense of what before and after mean.
She nods slowly. Her thumb traces a small, unconscious shape on my chest—back and forth, back and forth. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it, and I don’t tell her, because I want her to keep doing it for approximately the rest of my life.
“I meant it,” she says.
Just that.
I know she means the other thing.
The three-word thing she said more than once in the dark when it just came out of her like something her body couldn’t hold back. I know she means it. But hearing her say she meant it in the morning light—that lands.
I find her hand on my chest and hold it still, just for a second.
“I know,” I say, and then because I mean it too and have meant it for the better part of my adult life: “I meant it too. Every time. Every version. I love you.”
She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t flinch or hedge or qualify it. She just lies there and holds my gaze and lets it be true.
Her lips curve, small and private, as if the smile is just for the two of us and always has been.
We stay there.
The light moves.
Neither of us talks.
Then Harper’s expression shifts—just slightly enough that I suspect the outside world has come knocking at her brain, even if mine’s finally at rest.
“Have we heard anything about Dad?” she asks. Her voice is still sleep-rough as she props herself up on her fist.
“My priest friend’s been working every channel he has to try to get any information,” I say. “But the prison keeps stonewalling and saying Silas isn’t accepting visitors. We don’t know if it’s true or not.”
Harper collapses back against the pillow, hands over her face.
I watch her carry the guilt she’s been dragging around for ten years over something that was never her fault.
I hate it for her, but I also understand it really deeply.
Whoever tries to control the universe with magical thinking doesn’t blame themselves when everything goes wrong?
I just hate that she’s carried it alone all this time.
Then something rearranges in my brain. The kind of click that happens when a pattern resolves—when the numbers finally line up and you see what you were actually looking at.
I sit up.
“You know, we always assumed it was McKenzie who planted the weed in your locker.”
Harper uncovers her face to peek at me from between her fingers. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” I’m working it out as I say it, but I trust her to follow me. “Where would McKenzie have gotten that much weed? It was over four pounds, Harp. That’s not a rich girl making a call to her boyfriend’s dealer. That’s supply chain quantity.”
Harper sits up too. Something in her expression has shifted from grief into that alert, dangerous attention she gets when she’s seeing a pattern with me. “She was trying to get into the same schools you were.”
“Exactly. I knew McKenzie since second grade. She drank at parties and was a genuinely vicious bully, but she was a coward when real consequences were involved. She wouldn’t have let anyone with those kinds of connections within ten feet of her.”
“Wait.” Harper holds a hand up. “Are you saying the MC was involved all the way back then? But who would have even known Silas would take the fall for me? He’d barely been in my life up to that point. He hadn’t given a damn about me for most of my childhood.”
I never really let myself think about all the things that led up to that catastrophic day. It was all clouded in such shame—my fault, my fault, my fault—that I never tried examining the events with a more critical, dispassionate eye.
But now that I know what I know… if I think about the way Z had inserted himself into Harper’s life with my new family right when she was pulling away from him and he could feel he was about to lose her…
The way he’d learned all of us so thoroughly in those months he lived in our basement. How precisely every detonation was timed, the string of explosions set off so that in the end Z got exactly what he wanted.
Harper separated from everyone who loved her.
Because Z learned his enemy well.
“Don’t you remember that dinner?” I ask, fury building in my belly. “When Z mentioned bikers had come into Mom and Dad’s club. He told us at the dinner table about it, like he’d just happened to spot them.”
Harper’s eyes sharpen. “I remember.”