The realest.
I set the phone down. The case files still spread across the coffee table. The empty coffee mug she'd used last time. The jacket on my couch that I hadn't been able to move.
Tomorrow night, we'd start fresh. Build something on purpose instead of stumbling into it.
This time, I wasn't letting go.
CHAPTER 14
Sloane
I stoodin front of my closet like it held the answers to questions I didn't know how to ask.
It's just Garrett. You know him. You've known him for ten years.
But that was exactly why my hands were shaking. This wasn't a first date with a stranger, the kind where you could show up as any version of yourself and see what stuck. This was a second chance with the love of my life.
The stakes weren't higher, they were everything.
I pulled out a dress, considered it, put it back. Too casual. Another one. Too trying-too-hard. A third. Too much like a work event.
Wear something nice.
What did nice even mean after confessions that cracked me open and a night that put me back together? After waking up in his arms feeling whole for the first time in years?
I closed my eyes. Breathed.
Garrett at my door when I was falling apart. The way he'd held me without questions, without demands. The moment I'dfinally told him everything, the depression, the silence, the years I couldn't take back.
And he hadn't walked away.
I still love you.
And then we'd stopped talking. Found other ways to communicate.
His hands. His mouth. The weight of his body saying things words couldn't capture.
I'd fallen asleep in his arms and woken up believing, for the first time in years, that maybe I deserved to be happy.
I opened my eyes. Reached for a dress I'd bought two years ago and never worn, deep green silk, simple cut, the kind of thing that looked effortless but cost more than I'd ever admit. An impulse purchase after a particularly good story broke.
I'd told myself I was saving it for a special occasion.
This was the occasion.
I showered. Did my hair—down for once, the way Garrett always used to like it. Light makeup. A touch of perfume at my wrists and throat.
And then I opened my jewelry box.
The earrings were still there. Small diamonds in simple settings, the kind of understated elegance I'd never been able to afford myself. He'd given them to me for my twenty-third birthday, three months before the engagement. I'd worn them almost every day for two years.
I hadn't thrown them away. Hadn't been able to. They'd moved with me to DC, then back to New York, sitting in the bottom of my jewelry box like a secret I kept from myself.
I put them on.
The woman in the mirror looked like someone I hadn't been in a long time.
Someone who'd said yes without hesitating when he'd dropped to one knee on a Brooklyn rooftop, the city sprawled outbehind him, a ring box in his shaking hands, the words tumbling out like he'd been holding them in for months.
