It’s my lodge.
It’s my legacy.
And fucking hell, that is my goddamned bar and great room.
Mine.
The fire burns low, all embers and shadows. Someone left a half-finished puzzle on the coffee table, a mug with lipstick on the rim beside it. The lodge feels half-asleep—quiet, but not empty.
Something pulls me toward thealcove—the same invisible thread that's been yanking me toward Sierra Barrett since I was nineteen and stupid enough to fall for my best friends’ baby sister.
The display case doors hang open, Holly's cleaning project abandoned. My grandmother's ridiculous snowmen gleam in neat rows. A smile tugs at my mouth despite my mood. I’m halfway there to shut the doors when I see her.
Sierra’s curled up on the window seat, tucked into the angle of the wall like she’s trying to disappear into it. Legs folded, hair tumbling over her face, hand resting on her stomach.
Fast asleep.
For a second, I just stand there, breath stuck somewhere behind my ribs.
She looks softer like this. Less like the woman who damn near seared my retinas off last night and more like who I fell for. The one with wild hair I used to tug just to hear her breathe harder.
Her camera rests on the cushion beside her—never far from reach. But it's what's clutched in her hand that wrecks me.
A photograph.
The photograph.
Worn at the edges and creased from handling.
And from here… I can see us.
Me.
Her.
Together.
My breath stumbles.
My pulse spikes.
And every inch of frustration from the night dissolves into something I don’t have a name for. Something raw. Something old. Something I've spent nine years refusing to name.
Because whatever she’s holding onto… she’s been holding a long time and it tells a far different story than the one I’ve been clinging to for more than a decade.
The one she made sure I believed when she ended us.
Sierra with her head thrown back in laughter, throat bared, eyes closed, cheeks flushed. My arm around her waist, my mouth pressed to her neck, both of us oblivious to my grandmother and her sneaky little camera.
The only evidence that ever existed of what we were to each other. The proof I thought she'd destroyed along with whatever we might have become.
She kept it. All these years, she kept it. And suddenly every bitter certainty I've built my walls from starts to crack.
“Roman texted,” I say, my voice rougher than I intend. “They’ll be here early.”
Sierra startles awake, clutching the photo to her chest even before she's fully conscious. When her eyes land on me, they widen with the same panic from just hours earlier when I spotted her with Holly and Chance.
“You still have it.” My fingers itch to take the photograph, to confirm it's real. To confirm that any of it was real.
