“Yes,” she said.
The word came out stronger this time. Clearer.
Still yours.
Still here.
Still choosing this, choosing him, choosing to stop running and start staying.
Something softened around his eyes—a barely there tell she’d learned to read. The strain in his shoulders eased a fraction, and when he reached for her hand, the movement was sure, unhurried.
“You keep checking up on me. Supporting me.” Her fingers stroked the shell at her neck, feeling the faint warmth of the metal against her skin. “Giving me keys.”
He brushed his thumb along her jaw. “You’re the only one I want holding them.”
Her throat tightened. This wasn’t fear, or obligation, or gratitude. It was something steady. Certain.
“I love you,” she said. The words felt new. Fragile. But right.
David didn’t smile wide. Didn’t make a joke. He just exhaled like he’d been holding that breath for weeks. “I know,” he murmured, brushing his forehead to hers. “And I love you.”
He laced their fingers together like he’d been waiting to do it all day. Like he’d been worried she might not come back at all.
His grip was firm enough to ground her but gentle enough to let her go if she pulled back. She squeezed back, letting him feel her answer in the pressure of her fingers against his.
Lena took one last look at the little bungalow.
The rumpled quilt. The wobbling table with its cardboard shim. The shelf with its small collection of paperbacks and a single photograph. The window with its salt-streaked glass and ceramic bowl full of stories the ocean had written, and she’d collected.
This place had been her haven, her hideout, her safe space when the world had been too big and too cruel. It had sheltered her through lonely nights and difficult mornings. It had been enough when enough was all she could manage. It had been proof that she had climbed out of the pit Chester had thrown her into.
She walked out to David and the fading sun, his hand enclosing hers, her feet stable on the sand, moving toward something instead of away from it.
She didn’t look back.
Chapter 52
Sunset
The fire crackledhigh into the twilight, sparks drifting upward into the velvet sky, chasing stars. Someone had dug into the sand and stacked the driftwood just right—of course it was Zach, Lena realized with a smile, watching him toss a last piece onto the blaze and step back like a man completing a military operation. The bonfire roared its approval, golden light haloing the circle of beach chairs arranged haphazardly around it.
Lena stood shoulder to shoulder with David outside the ring, the toes of her bare feet buried in still-warm sand. His hand was a gentle anchor on the small of her back. It made her pulse skip in a sweet, addictive way.
From the other side of the fire, Kate raised her enamel mug with a theatrical flair. “To Lena, the only person alive who could survive a stalker, fling grenades at the saboteur with her eyes closed?—”
“It was one sabotage attempt, not urban warfare,” Lena called, laughing.
Kate ignored her: “—and somehow turn down Zach’s alphabetized onboarding packet without dying of fear!”
Even Zach cracked the barest smirk at that, though Lena wasn’t sure it reached his eyes, even if it was more emotionthan he usually displayed. Marguerite hooted with reckless glee, tugging on Nick’s arm like a mischievous older sister rather than his self-appointed mother.
Nick stood, glass in hand. He raised it with practiced charm. “To Lena, for officially taking on the FOM position and surviving the gut-wrenching bureaucratic hell that is onboarding at Ivory Tower Resorts?—”
“Which I intend to revise,” Lena quirked an eyebrow at David.
His glasses glinted from the flicker of the fire. “Noted. But it’s tradition,” he murmured near her ear.
She tipped her head toward him, her hair brushing his jaw. “So is karaoke, and I plan to make you suffer.”
