“Mm, not me. I paid someone to furnish the place. I didn’t want to come without you.” She nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder. “If you don’t like it, we can sell it. It was just the first halfway decent place that came up, and I was in a hurry.”
“No,” he said immediately. “It’s ours, now.”
She smiled, twining her fingers in the wet hair at his nape. “Mmkay.”
He wandered a bit before he found the master bedroom, sparsely furnished with a king-sized bed and a single end table. He tucked her beneath the covers and slid in beside her, dragging her closer until she was draped across her chest.
“You’ll be here when I wake up, right? This isn’t all some fever dream?”
“I’ll be here in the morning and every morning after for the rest of your life. You’ll never get rid of me, Ophelia.”
She sighed, her breath tickling the damp skin of his chest. “Good.”
He smiled down at her, gently finger-combing her damp hair.
“Hey, Sam?”
“Hm?”
“Welcome home.”
He clutched her closer, burying his nose in her hair and breathing her in deep.
“Welcome home, Ophelia.”
He felt her smile against his skin.
EPILOGUE
Ophelia cursedunder her breath as the contents of the tray in her hands slid off balance, threatening to topple the whole thing.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” she said, threatening the champagne. “Don’t even think about it.”
With a bit of shuffling, she managed to keep the tall bottle from careening over the edge and shattering all over her newly refinished floors. She carefully carried it from the kitchen down the back steps. Pea gravel shifted under her bare feet as she made her way down into the fields.
A sea of glowing blue lilies rippled around her as the warm summer breeze stirred them. Their leaves rasped against one another, whispering to her in a cadence she’d come to find soothing—the sound of home.
And home, for the first time in her life, was a place of true safety.
She waded into one of the neat rows with her tray, soil sticking to her feet. There was a time it would have been enough to send her into a spiral, but she’d spent so many days buried up to her elbows in this dirt, and nothing bad had ever happened to her—as Sam always reminded her on the bad days.
Pollen clung to the hem of her sundress like glowing pixie dust as she wandered deeper into the maze of flowers.
“Sam?” she called, squinting.
Even with the glow of the flowers, she couldn’t make out his dark form in the darkness. Something grabbed her ankle, and she shrieked, heaving the tray up into the air. Her champagne bottle and the two flutes she’d brought went flying, along with her little container of chocolate dip and the strawberries she’d just rinsed.
She gave a cry of dismay as she looked down at the mess. Cursing, Sam rolled to his feet.
“I’m sorry, I only meant to tease you,” he blurted, kneeling to pick up the champagne. “I forget your vision is so much less acute in the dark.”
She pouted down at him as he dusted off the scattered items, her bottom lip quivering.
His eyes widened.
“No, no, no,” he said, harriedly putting everything down on the tray and springing to his feet. He cupped her face in his hands. “Don’t cry, I’m sorry.” He pressed frantic kisses over her cheeks and forehead. “I’ll fix it, don’t cry.”
Seeing this surly robot who’d threatened murder so many times on the verge of a breakdown at the thought of her crying chipped away at her misery. An uneven laugh escaped her as she shrugged out of his grip.
