"Especially when you push."
She presses her face into my chest and I hold her there and listen to her breathing slow and I think about Jess. Not with guilt this time. With gratitude. Because Jess taught me what happens when communication fails, and that lesson is the reason I checked in six times tonight. The reason I tracked Zara'sbreathing. The reason I stopped three times when I wanted nothing more than to give her everything.
Jess taught me the cost of getting it wrong. Zara is showing me what it looks like to get it right.
"Ronan."
"Yeah."
"Don't ever lie to me again."
"Never."
"And keep the blue henley. It works for you."
I laugh. Full and real and vibrating through both our bodies, and she holds onto the sound the way she holds onto me. With both hands. With everything she has.
I press my mouth to the top of her head and breathe her in and I think: I spent two years convincing myself I wasn't safe enough to love.
I was wrong.
EPILOGUE
ZARA
SIX MONTHS LATER
The flannel shirt doesn't smell like cedar anymore. It smells like both of us.
I'm wearing it in the kitchen of our cabin because somewhere around month three I stopped calling it his cabin and he stopped pretending he wanted me to. My coffee mug sits next to his on the counter. My running shoes are by the door next to his hiking boots. My nursing license renewal paperwork is stacked on the kitchen table next to his survey maps and a half finished sketch of a great horned owl he spotted last Tuesday.
Our lives have tangled together like the roots of mountain trees, slowly and then all at once, until pulling them apart would damage both systems beyond repair.
"You're going to be late," Ronan says from the bedroom doorway, and I look up from my coffee to find him leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and that look on his face. The one that started as a ghost smile in the Ember Lounge and has evolved into something full and warm and aimed exclusively at me.
"I'm the head nurse. I can't be late. I set the schedule."
"You set the schedule and then ignore it. Sage texted you twenty minutes ago asking where you are."
He's right. The Bean & Bloom Saturday morning breakfast has become a fixture in my life that I didn't know I needed until I had it. Sage and Luna and Venus and Nadia crowd into the corner booth and drink too much coffee and talk about everything from men to medicine to the particular challenges of being Black women building lives in a mountain town that didn't expect us but has no idea what it would do without us.
Nadia is the one who gets it most. Not just the military thing, though she understands that too in the way that anyone who's loved a soldier does. She gets the part about showing up in a new place and falling for a Ridge brother and wondering if you've lost your mind or finally found it. We compared notes over whiskey at The Velvet Antler two months ago and by the end of the night we were laughing so hard that Callum and Ronan exchanged the specific look of men who know they're being discussed and have wisely decided not to ask.
"Tell Sage I'll be there in fifteen." I take one more sip. "And tell your brother to stop teaching you how to manage me. Callum's technique doesn't work on Montgomery women."
"Callum's technique doesn't work on anyone. That's what makes it entertaining."
He crosses the kitchen and kisses me. Not a quick morning peck. A real kiss, slow and thorough, his hand sliding under the flannel to rest against my bare hip. Six months in and the chemistry between us hasn't dimmed by a single degree. If anything it's sharper now because every touch is layered with history. With the memory of how we started and the knowledge of what we've built since.
"I have something for you," he says against my mouth. "But it can wait until tonight."
"You can't say that to me and expect me to function for the next twelve hours."
"I can. And I do." He pulls back and the look in his eyes is pure dominant calm. Patient. Controlled. Devastating. "Think of it as an exercise in anticipation."
"Think of it as an exercise in me plotting your demise over pancakes."
He smiles. The real one. And six months in, I still haven't gotten used to the way that smile transforms his face from serious and guarded into something so open it makes my chest ache.
