"I know you are."
She almost smiles. It doesn't reach her eyes, but she tries, and the trying is its own kind of bravery.
Then she walks past me, back toward the door, back into the party where the lights are warm and the music is loud and no one will ask her why her eyes look different than they did an hour ago.
The porch door opens and closes behind her.
I stand there for a moment, alone in the cold. And then I realize I'm not alone.
Ounce is leaning against the railing at the far end of the porch.
I didn't see him—I never see him. The man moves like smoke.
Six-five and invisible when he wants to be, which is most of the time.
He's watching the door Kinsey just walked through.
Those dark eyes—half-closed, the way they get when he's processing something he's not ready to name.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't acknowledge me. Just watches the closed door with an expression that I've only seen one other time.
The one Coin gave me. The first time he looked at me across a hospital waiting room.
I go back inside.
Coin finds me maybe twenty minutes later.
"Come outside with me," he says, his hand on the small of my back. "I want to show you something."
"I was just outside. It's freezing."
"It'll be worth it." That almost-smile. The real one.
He guides me through the back door, past the kitchen where Ellie is threatening Maddox with a wooden spoon, past the hallway where Wrenleigh is showing Sadie Jo something on her phone and both of them are laughing, past all of it.
The back of the clubhouse opens onto a patch of grass that slopes down toward the tree line.
The sky is enormous—clear, cold, more stars than I've seen in months.
The mountains are darker than the sky, holding the valley the way they always do, the way they've done for millions of years before any of us were here to notice.
Coin stops at the edge of the grass, turns to face me and takes both my hands.
"What are you doing?" I ask. My heart is doing something it has no business doing.
"Something I should've done weeks ago." He reaches into his pocket.
Not for the coin—although the coin is there, it's always there.
His other pocket.
And what he pulls out is small, and it catches the light from the clubhouse windows, and my entire cardiovascular system reroutes itself for the second time in my life.
"Coin—"
"Let me do this." He looks at me. Those blue-gray eyes, full of everything he used to lock down and doesn't anymore. "Leah Mercer. I spent ten years convincing myself I didn't need anyone. That being alone was the same as being strong. That I could raise my girls and run the club books and hold it all together by myself, and that was enough."
He pauses.
