My forehead against her temple.
Our hands still laced together on the pillow—my bare left hand, her scarred right.
The tan line on my finger is pressed against her skin.
A white stripe where gold used to be.
She traces it with her thumb.
Back and forth.
Not erasing it—acknowledging it.
The mark of what was.
The evidence of a love that existed and mattered and left its impression on a man's body the way it left its impression on his heart.
"Does it feel different?" she asks. Quiet. Her breath warm against my jaw.
"Yeah." I shift to my side, pulling her with me, keeping her close. My bare hand settles on her hip—the curve of it, the warmth, the weight of a living woman under my palm with nothing between us. "Lighter. Terrifying."
"Terrifying is honest."
"Terrifying is where I live now." I press my mouth to her hair. Breathe her in. "But it's a better kind of terrifying than the kind I've been doing."
She laughs. Small, warm, the laugh that comes after tears.
Her hand is on my chest, over my heart.
My bare hand on her hip.
The ring on the nightstand, catching the light, holding its small gold circle of memory in a room that is filling, finally, with something new.
Morning. Early light. The woman I love in my arms.
My hand bare. My chest open. My lungs full.
I'm not the man Rose married.
That man died on a highway in the rain five and a half years ago, screaming into a phone.
But I'm the man she'd want me to become—the one who stopped being an idiot, the one who let someone in.
There's room for the gold ring on the nightstand and the dark-haired woman in my bed.
There's room for the grief and the joy.
There's room for Rose's memory and Bex's heartbeat and the first full morning of whatever comes next.
Bex presses closer. Her lips against my collarbone. A murmur I almost don't catch. "She'd be so happy, Lee."
Yeah. She would.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bex
I’m finishing up at the Henley farm when Lee calls.
