"I love you."
The yard goes quiet, or maybe it doesn't.
Maybe the brothers are still talking and the bikes are still ticking as they cool and Earl's chair is still creaking on the porch.
Maybe the world keeps moving and it's only mine that stops.
"I love you," he says again, and his voice cracks on the word the way a man's voice cracks when he's saying something he forgot how to say and the muscles are remembering. "I'm sorry it took me this long. I'm sorry for the years and the silence and the voicemails I should have answered. I'm sorry I made you do all of this alone. But, I’m here now and I can’t imagine my life without you, Bexley Dalton, and I want you to be my ol’lady."
My hands are on his wrists. Holding on. His pulse is hammering under my fingers.
"I can't lose you too." A whisper. Broken. The confession of a man who has already lost everything once and is standing in front of a woman telling her she's the reason he survived it. "I can't, Bex."
I look at him.
Lee Simms. Rose's husband.
The man who rescues broken horses because he can't rescue himself.
And now he's here.
Standing in Earl's yard with dust on his boots and his club behind him and his hands on my face, saying the words I stopped waiting to hear.
"Then stop running from me." My voice is steady. My eyes are not. "Stop disappearing. Stop protecting yourself from the people who love you. Stay, Lee. Just stay."
He kisses me.
In front of the brothers.
In front of Shadow, who is watching with something on his face that looks like a man seeing his best friend come back from the dead.
In front of Phantom, who gives it one second of acknowledgment before turning away to give us the moment.
In front of Earl, who is sitting on his porch in his rocker with his coffee in his hand, watching his son-in-law kiss the woman he raised as a daughter on the land where his real daughter used to play.
Earl lifts the coffee mug. A quiet salute. To us. To Rose. To the stubborn, improbable survival of a family that was supposed to end years ago and refused.
Lee pulls back, rests his forehead against mine.
We stand in the yard breathing together, his hands still on my face, mine still on his wrists, the last of the afternoon sun turning everything gold.
"You're stuck with me," he says. Low. Almost smiling.
"And, you’re stuck with me, ol’ man."
Behind us, a brother wolf-whistles.
Someone else tells him to shut up.
Shadow laughs—a real, full laugh, the laugh of a man who has waited a long time for something good to happen to his best friend.
Earl sips his coffee, rocks his chair, and watches the sun go down over land that is his, that will stay his, that holds his daughter in the ground and his family on the porch and a future he might not live to see but will die knowing exists.
I lean into Lee and he wraps his arm around me.
We choose each other, and I’ve never felt more loved in my entire life.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
