I glance up at him, and what started as a friendly hug, a lifeline after a hell of a day, has shifted into something entirely different. His arms are security themselves. Safety.
Home.
Here in his arms, wanting swells inside me—hot, reckless. His chest is solid beneath my cheek, his hand steady at my back, like he already knows how to hold me through worsethings than this.
I sit up and put distance between us before I do something stupid.
“So,” I say, too quickly, “how was your day?”
He studies me for a beat, like he clocked exactly why I pulled away.
“Good,” he says. “We’re closing down Shadow Justice.”
Whatever I was thinking before evaporates. “Closing it how?”
“Ending it.” He shrugs. “It did what it needed to do. Now I’m going to be a dad. I want something flexible. Something that works for our kid.”
It touches me that Anton is thinking this way. I’ve seen a lot of friends and colleagues enter motherhood throughout my thirties and take up teaching or Etsy stores to work between school pick-up. That this giant, alpha male is thinking the same way melts me to the core.
“And what did you decide?”
“Woodworking. Furniture. Custom pieces.” His mouth curves. “I can do it anywhere.”
Anywhere.
He means wherever our baby is. And I easily imagine him in any version of what that means—but isn’t that a problem?
I still have something to prove—to myself most of all. I need to know I can build a life, a career, a sense of purpose driven by me alone. That I’m not defining myself through someone else’s lens.
I need to matter on my own before I let myself matter to someone else.
Can I still do all that with Anton around when I feel like…this? Like I could skip right over everything and get to whereverhisanywhere is?
My grandma always said that when you meet the one,you’ll know. She’s always been a different spirit from my mom.
And that’s the thing about Anton. Ever since the morning he showed up on my old apartment fire escape, something in me reached for him before I had time to think.
I feel it again now. In the quiet. In the stillness. In the way his arms wrap around me like soft armor that would protect me from the devil himself.
Our baby is one lucky human.
I look up into his blue eyes—blazing with a commitment that clearly goes so far beyond being my right-hand man on this case. “That sounds great. You’re very good with your hands.”
The double meaning has me swallowing hard.
His gaze flicks to my mouth.
If he kissed me right now, I’m not sure I’d stop him. I’m not sure I could.
I’ve never loved a man before, but I’m pretty sure this is how it feels when you’re standing on the edge of it.
Dinner goes by in a blur. I’m wrung out from the emotion of the day, so I turn down Netflix with him in the living room, take a bath, and head to bed.
When I finally crawl under the covers, sleep doesn’t come.
Not with the image of that wrench in my mind.
Not with the sound of that snapping twig echoing in my bones.
