After dinner, William went upstairs to get ready for bed. Jolly followed, the way he followed every night, his nails clicking on the stairs behind the boy’s bare feet.
Ben and I sat on the deck wrapped in a blanket, the December air mild.
The mountains were black against a sky full of stars. Three months since Vance had pointed a gun at me on a dark road and everything had changed.
Vance was in federal custody now—the drug syndicate completely dismantled. Jonathan Porter, whose name had threaded through the investigation from the beginning, had been cleared.
He wasn’t dirty. Just a businessman who bought cheap properties without asking why the prices were low. Vance had built the trail toward Porter deliberately, one more layer of misdirection from a man who’d spent months making sure every road led somewhere that wasn’t him.
The town was healing. The department was healing. We were all healing, in our own time, at our own pace.
Ben’s hand found my knee. I leaned my head on hisshoulder. The silence between us was comfortable and lived-in.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
My stomach didn’t drop. Six months ago, it would’ve. Any sentence that started withI need to tell you somethingfrom a man I cared about would have sent me straight to the worst-case scenario.
But this was Ben. Ben didn’t build up to bad news. He just delivered it.
“Okay.”
“I called Ethan last week. Asked him to make Summit Falls my permanent base, even though I’m wrapping up the K9 training here.” He said it the way he said most important things. Quietly. “I’ll still take missions. But this is where I’ll come back to. Every time.”
I lifted my head from his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He traced a circle on my knee with his thumb. “Which brings me to the part where I go back to that house every morning and get dressed and come back over here. It’s convenient to be next door, but not as convenient as if we all lived here.”
Something shifted in the air between us. I looked at his face. He was looking straight ahead at the mountains, but his jaw had that set to it. The one that meant he was working up to something he’d already decided and wanted to say right.
“I wanted to have the Ethan conversation first,” he said. “Before I asked you anything else. I needed you to know this was permanent before I put my boots next to your door.”
“Ben.” I cupped his cheek. “I love you. William loves you. Move in. The house next door can be your office, your gear storage, whatever you need. But stop going back there to sleep.”
“I don’t want to move in.”
I dropped my hand. “Oh.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a ring. Simple, understated.
“Or I guess I should say, I don’t want tojustmove in. I want to marry you. I want to officially be William’s father, if both of you want that.”
I looked at the ring. I looked at him. Tried to wrap my head around this.
“You’ve been carrying that around.”
“For two weeks.”
“Twoweeks?”
“I was waiting for the right moment.”
“And the right moment is now?”
“Yeah. I was working up to it. I love you. More than anything I’ve ever loved in my whole life.”
He’d said I love you before, of course. Said it nearly every day. But this was more than that.
I took the ring from his hand and slipped it on my finger. It fit. Of course it fit.
