Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
I kissed her forehead. “That’s because I’m not trying to fix you, baby. I’m just telling the truth.”
Her arms tightened around me. “I love you.”
The words came easy now, like breathing. And every time she said them, I felt them settle deeper in my chest, rooting me to her.
“I love you too.”
We sat like that, the night stretching quiet and peaceful around us, the weight of grief still there but softened by something stronger.
Family. Love. The promise of a life built not from the ashes of what we’d lost, but from the strength of what we still had.
Three months hadn’t healed everything. Maybe it never would. But with Melody in my arms and my daughter by her side, I finally believed we could live with the scars.
And maybe, just maybe, we could build something beautiful out of the wreckage.
EPILOGUE
MELODY
Six Months Later
The cabin had become a real home. It took time. At first it was just wood and nails, a square box tucked into the pines with a porch like a shrugged shoulder. I’d walk the rooms and hear the echo of my own footsteps, the hollow of a life that wasn’t filled in yet. Enzo had the house but treated it as a crash pad. He’d kept it as a place to park his bike and let silence win. When he put a key in my palm and said, “Welcome Home,” it felt like a dare and a promise stitched together.
Three months later, the cabin carried the shape of us. His boots by the door, scuffed to hell and lined up like guards. My sweater thrown over the back of the couch, a soft puddle of blue because I never remembered to fold it. The scent of coffee ground and candles that smelled like clean cotton because he pretended not to care about candles and then lit them anyway. A ceramic mug Elaina had painted at one of those little shops where you can be as creative or as terrible as you want; it sat beside the sink, a lopsided heart on the side. She laughed when she gave it to him, telling him he’d never use it because it was too pretty, and he’d argued that nothing was too pretty for his coffee while he cleared his throat.
We had dinner dishes drying on a towel because the dishwasher made a noise he called “a dying cricket.” He said he’d fix it on a weekend and then took me on a ride instead. Priorities. I didn’t mind. I liked the normal of plates clinking and suds up to my wrists. I liked that we were the ones to do it together, talking about nothing and everything.
Tonight, he set two bowls on the coffee table—vanilla ice cream for me, a scoop like a snow mountain; something called rocky road for him that looked like he planned to beat it into submission—and dropped onto the couch. The cushions dipped as he pulled me toward him. He liked me tucked close. It was one of the many small ways he put his claim around me without saying a word. I pretended to complain sometimes, to keep the game alive. Tonight I just leaned in.
“Movie or music?” he asked, remote in one hand, spoon in the other.
“Music,” I replied, because my head was too full for a plot. “Something low. The kind of guitar that sounds like it was played on a porch by someone with time.”
He snorted. “You and your poet brain.”
“You love my poet brain.”
“Yeah,” he retorted, simply, “I do.”
He put on a playlist he claimed was “random” but always seemed to know what I needed before I did. A guitar threaded through the room, soft and patient. He tipped my bowl toward me in warning, as if I was the one who’d spill, and then stretched an arm behind my shoulders, his fingertips idly tracing circles at the nape of my neck.
I ate three bites and then set the bowl down, not ready to swallow cold sweets when my mouth was full of a different kind of brave. I’d spent all day carrying it around—through the laundry, through the grocery store, through the laugh with the cashier who said she liked my boots. I’d tucked it in my pocket next to a folded paper towel and an object I could not stop touching, checking, confirming. It was a secret and it was a surprise for sure. I’d wanted the right moment. It had found me.
“Can I ask you something?” I wondered.
He refolded himself somehow without moving, attention snapping to me like a blade turned toward light. I still wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of that focus when it wasn’t about danger. He could do it in the kitchen over eggs and make me feel like I was the only thing in the world worth listening to.