"Now we fight." Charlotte pulled back slightly, her eyes bright in the gathering dusk. "Together. Starting tomorrow."
"What happens tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow, you do your exercises. All of them. And I'm going to be there to make sure you don't quit halfway through."She squeezed my hand. "And then we figure out the rest. One day at a time."
"One day at a time," I repeated. It wasn't a cure. It wasn't a guarantee. But it was more than I'd had an hour ago.
It was a beginning.
"Miles?" Charlotte's voice was soft.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For telling me the truth. For letting me in, even when it scared you." She pressed another kiss to my hand. "That's all I ever wanted. To be let in."
I looked at her, this woman who'd walked back into my life and refused to leave, who'd seen my worst fears and met them with fire instead of pity, who was choosing me despite every reason I'd given her not to.
"I don't deserve you," I said quietly.
"Probably not." She grinned. "But you're stuck with me now. No returns, no exchanges."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a promise."
We sat there as the light faded, her hand in mine, the river murmuring its endless song. I didn't know what came next. I didn't know if I could be the person she believed I could be.
But for the first time in five years, I wanted to try.
And that, I was beginning to understand, was where everything started.
9.Charlotte
The first rose appeared the morning after the river.
I opened my apartment door, still half-asleep and fumbling for my keys, and nearly stepped on it. A single white rose in a slender glass vase, placed carefully on the welcome mat. No note. No explanation. Just the flower, its petals holding droplets of dawn dew like tiny diamonds.
My favorite. He'd remembered, a throwaway comment I'd made fifteen years ago about preferring white roses to red because they seemed more honest somehow. Less performative. Real.
"You absolute sap," I whispered in my empty hallway, but I was smiling so hard my cheeks hurt.
The second rose appeared the next morning. And the third. By day five, I had a small collection on my kitchen windowsill, a silent, shaky-handed promise renewed with every sunrise.
He never mentioned them. Neither did I. Some things didn't need words.
Five days after the river, and we'd fallen into a rhythm I hadn't known I was missing. A rhythm that felt less like building something new and more like remembering something we'dalways known, just with better recipes and more medication reminders.
"You're murdering that onion."
I looked up from the cutting board in Miles's kitchen, where I was indeed hacking at an onion with more enthusiasm than skill. "I'mdicingit."
"You're committing vegetable homicide." Miles leaned against the counter, his arms crossed, watching me with an expression that was trying very hard to be serious. "That onion had a family, Charlotte."
"It's going into the soup. Fulfilling its onion destiny."
"A destiny of violence, apparently."
I brandished the knife at him playfully. "Do you want to do this?"
