My pulse jumps. “Axel…”
He doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t reach for me. But his restraint is somehow even more unnerving than if he had.
“I can’t forgive myself,” he says quietly. “Not for the fire. Not for losing you. Not for everything that followed.”
“You didn’t lose me,” I whisper.
His eyes search mine like he’s looking for truth carved into my bones. “Savannah… you left.”
My throat tightens. “Because staying felt impossible. Because everywhere I looked, I saw what I lost. Because I couldn’t breathe here anymore. Because…” My voice thins. “Because if I’d stayed, I would’ve loved you too much to survive it.”
His breath stutters.
A raw, broken sound escapes him—soft, strangled, real. It hits me in the center of my chest.
We stand like that—close, aching, orbiting each other without touching—as snow falls quietly around us.
He whispers, “I never stopped wanting you to come home.”
“I never thought I’d want to.”
Another beat of silence.
“Do you?” he asks.
Do I?
God help me.
Yes.
But the word freezes on my tongue because saying it out loud might ignite everything that’s already smoldering between us.
We don’t move.
We don’t speak.
We just breathe the same cold air, hearts beating too fast, heat building too quickly, two people caught between the ashes of the past and the spark of something dangerously alive.
Finally, I manage a whisper.
“We should go.”
His jaw flexes. “Yeah.”
But neither of us steps back.
Not yet.
Not until the snow drifts heavier and reality presses between us like a wall we’re forced to acknowledge.
Only then do we turn away, walking slowly toward our separate vehicles—not touching, not speaking, but painfully aware that something shifted today.
Something we can’t untangle.
Can’t ignore.
Can’t bury again.
