“I don’t get you.”
She steps beside me now, angled to stare out of the window. “She’s been miserable for six years, Aiden. You’ve been miserable, too. And neither of you deserve that.”
“You know what I deserve.”
Her shoulders bounce once. “Just because our father?—”
“Not everything is about him, Carlie.” I turn to face the window, too. “I’ve done some fucked-up shit. I don’t deserve her.”
“Maybe happiness isn’t a reward for good behavior. Maybe it’s something you should grab onto, no matter what fucked-up shit you’ve done. Because it will make you happy. And it’ll make her happy, too.”
I glance at her. “So, you want me to confess everything? Dump six years of regret at her feet and hope it fixes something?”
Carlie shakes her head. “No. I want you to stop deciding the ending before it happens. Stop anticipating the myriad ways you’ll fuck things up, and just go with the flow. You both want this. There’s no reason to think it’ll go wrong.”
“If we do this, that means I’m involved. Which means it’ll go wrong.”
“That’s Dad talking.”
I shoot her a look.
She is undeterred. “You know I’m right.”
I clear my throat and look out the window. Images flicker through my mind—Harper in my kitchen this morning, barefoot, wearing my shirt like it didn’t feel wrong. The way she watched me with Mason like she was afraid to trust what she was seeing. The question she asked me last night, steady and terrified all at once.
Do I regret her? No. I regret hurting her. But if I had said that last night, it might have given her false hope about us, and that’d be me hurting her again, this time with extra steps. I can’t do this.
“Don’t hurt her again,” Carlie says softly. “But also… don’t let fear ruin a second chance you never thought you’d get. You’ve both been miserable for too long.”
A sound cuts through the quiet. A soft, unmistakable gasp from the hallway. Not the sound a child makes.
Carlie’s head snaps toward the door. My stomach drops instantly, cold and fast.
Harper was listening to us. For how long… I don’t know. Fuck.
The silence after the gasp is worse than the sound itself—charged, exposed, irreversible. I reach for the door, every instinct screaming to explain, to stop this from becoming another fracture I can’t fix.
Before my hand reaches the knob, my phone vibrates hard in my pocket.
Carlie looks at me, eyes wide. “Go talk to her.”
I pull it out, dread coiling tight in my chest. “It’s work. I have to take this.”
Carlie rolls her eyes and sighs. She knows what it’s like to have important moments cut short because of the job.
When I click it, Grant’s speaking already. “Aiden, we’ve completed the review on the bar fire.”
I step back automatically, putting distance between myself and the door before answering. “And?”
There’s a pause on the line. Paper shuffling. The faint echo of a large room. He’s in his office. “The electrical fire itself checks out. Faulty wiring. Old building. Nothing surprising there.”
I exhale slowly, not realizing until that moment how much I’d been holding onto that possibility. She’ll have to get the place rewired. I’m not letting her work in a hazardous building. “Okay, thanks for the call?—”
“That’s not all,” he adds. “One of my guys flagged something else. The gas feed behind the bar.”
I straighten. “What about it?”
Another pause. Deliberate this time. “Someone loosened the connection. Not enough to cause an immediate issue—but enough that, combined with the electrical fault, it could’ve gone very differently.”
