“I would choose her over everything. And maybe if you’d ever shown me just a modicum of care, you’d understand why.”
I press my hand harder against my mouth. This is Logan—myLogan—who freezes in confrontation, who spent thirty-four years believing he was too broken to fight for anything. And he’s burning it all down. For me.
Footsteps. Coming toward the stairs.
I scramble to my feet, my heart racing, and rush up the remaining steps. I make it to his apartment door and slip inside just as I hear him reach the landing below.
Seconds later, the door opens.
Logan steps through, and his face is wrecked—eyes red, jaw tight, the careful composure completely shattered. He looks like a man who’s just gone to war and isn’t sure if he won.
I don’t give him time to speak.
I throw myself into his arms, kissing him with everything I have. He catches me, stumbling back against the door, and for a moment he’s frozen—stunned—and then his arms come around me like a vise, holding on like I’m the only thing keeping him upright.
“I heard,” I whisper against his mouth. “I heard everything.”
“Audrey—”
“You love me.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and there’s so much in his eyes—fear, hope, exhaustion, relief—that it makes my chest ache.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I love you. I should have told you before. I should have told you a hundred times. I was just?—”
“Scared. I know.” I brush my thumb across his cheekbone, catching a tear he probably didn’t even know was there.
The words are right there. Three syllables I’ve been holding behind my teeth for weeks, maybe longer. The last time I letmyself feel this much for someone, I ended up on a plane to Stockholm with a broken heart and a new hair color.
But Logan just went to war for me. The least I can do is show up without my armor.
“I love you too, you idiot.”
CHAPTER 25
Logan
Ilove you too, you idiot.
The words echo in my apartment—my sanctuary—while my parents sit in the wreckage of dinner two floors below.
She what? For a moment, I can’t breathe. Can’t do anything but stare at the woman in my arms who just said the thing I’ve been terrified to hope for.
She loves me.
Not despite everything she witnessed downstairs. Not in spite of my disaster of a family, or my years of emotional constipation, and the months we spent dancing around our feelings. Or the fact that I’ve been hiding half my life from her.
She just… loves me.
My brain keeps running the calculation, looking for the error. There has to be one. People don’t love the broken parts—they tolerate them at best, leave because of them at worst. That’s how the math has always worked.
But Audrey’s looking at me like my math was wrong all along.
“Say it again,” I whisper, and I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s raw, broken, desperate—the voice of someone who’s spent his whole life waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Audrey’s eyes soften. She traces her thumb across my cheekbone before sliding my glasses off my face. “I love you, Logan. I love you. And I’ll say it as many times as you need to hear it.”
Something cracks open inside me. Not the painful kind of breaking—the kind that lets light in. The kind that happens when you’ve been holding yourself together so tightly for so long that you forgot you were allowed to fall apart.
