“So,” he rasped, “where are we headed next?”
“Well, what about baseball? Your shoulder? Where do you need to be?”
“I need to be with you.” He kissed my forehead. His arms, this safety, they were what I needed. “Tell me where we’re going and I’m there. We’ll figure it out together.”
If he kept saying things like that, someone would need to scrape me off the floor.
“I was thinking Middlebury,” I said.Home. Middlebury felt like home again, especially with Nathan by my side. “I don’t want to sell the café, Nathan. I love it there. It’sours.”
Nathan’s brow wrinkled. “You sure?”
His skepticism was understandable. Nathan knew that before the mess with our parents, I’d wanted to move back to Middlebury after college. But living there hadn’t been easy toward the end of high school, and I abandoned my plan. These last few months, though, we replaced the tough memories with new ones as we fell in love with each other all over again.
Middlebury was the first place I called home, not because I lived there the longest, or because the house was the nicest place I’d stayed as a kid. Or that my favorite person in the world lived there. I liked that the town was small enough for people to knoweach other. It meant nosiness but also genuine caring. A strong community. And we would need that to raise Molly.
“I’m sure.” I leaned my forehead against Nathan’s. “I cried after you left me at the airport.”
“I’d like to think it had something to do with me,” he said wryly.
I pulled back to stare him in the eyes. “It hadeverythingto do with you and the life we’re carving out in Middlebury. But we’ll need to find a new home.”
“I’ll live wherever you want.” His voice was saturated with emotion. “As long as I wake up next to you every morning.”
“You’re giving me an awful lot of power.”
Nathan leaned his forehead against mine again. “I trust you with it, Bren.”
Trust was the last thing to come back. Trust was more logical than love, less instinctual than attraction.
“I trust you too,” I said, fighting more tears.
“We’re going to be happy, Brenna Quinn.I’mgoing to make you happy.”
“Oh, back to calling your shot, are you?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “You loved it when we were kids. It’s why I kept doing it. I lived to make you smile.”
I tilted my head to the side. “Oh? I thought it was because you were a cocky little shit.”
Nathan kissed me, knocking the floor out from under my stomach. He was breathless when he released me. “Nah, that was me showing off for my girl.”
We had many details to sort as we embarked on this new life together. We needed to find somewhere to live, a place big enough for three people and four cats. Molly needed a school and activities that would help her make friends in Middlebury. Nathan would undergo surgery and rehabilitation to get anothershot at this dream. I wanted to reenroll in a master’s program for physical therapy.
But none of that stirred my usual anxiety, because I wouldn’t be doing it alone. I had Nathan. We were partners. A team.
Family.
I thought then of the girl who looked out her window after moving to her fifth city in five years. She watched a boy tossing a baseball to himself, zipping it high in the air and catching it with his glove. Her heart skipped a beat when he spotted her and motioned her to come outside. An introvert at heart, she shied away from people but not him. Never him.
It was the start of a friendship unlike any she’d known. The kind of love story she’d read about in books, a soul-deep connection.
Connections like that never died.
Our story proved it.
Epilogue
BRENNA
