"They'll recover."
"I was trying to be the impressive one for our Lucky Charm?—"
"You're not. Go outside."
I look at Mila. She's pressing her lips together in the specific way of someone who is absolutely going to laugh the second I'm out of eyeline. Declan, behind her, has the controlled expression of a man witnessing a familiar dynamic and choosing not to intervene because the outcome is already established.
"Fine," I say. "I'll wait outside. In the cold. Alone."
"You're wearing a jacket," Rowan says.
"Emotionally cold, Rowan."
He doesn't respond to this. He's already at the counter.
I go outside.
The afternoon has settled into something that almost qualifies as pleasant—the storm's legacy is the washed-clean quality of the air and the streets, the particular freshness of a place that's been thoroughly rained on and has come out theother side with better light than it went in with. The sun is doing what it can with March, which is limited but genuine. The cobblestones are still damp in the shadows but dry in the open stretches, and the town moves around me with the Monday afternoon rhythm of a place that knows what it is and isn't trying to be anything else.
I lean against the wall beside the shop door.
And I think about what I said inside.
Twenty days. That's the registered agreement, the legal fact, the thing that was filed last night while she was sleeping and that becomes official documentation this afternoon. Twenty days and then an Easter annulment option and everyone returns to their actual lives. That's the arrangement. That's what it is.
The thing I keep snagging on is: it doesn't feel like an arrangement.
I've been in enough surface-level situations to know the specific quality of a connection that has an expiration date built into it—the enjoyable, uncomplicated kind that both parties understand implicitly and exit cleanly. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like something that started in an hour-ago space and has been accelerating toward a question I'm not certain I know the answer to yet.
She came back to Declan's bed.
Not intentionally—sleepwalking, she said, something she used to do when she was sleeping very deeply and hasn't apparently done since. But the direction of it, the specific draw of a body finding the strongest scent in the room and moving toward it even in unconsciousness—that's not random. That's biology doing what biology does when something registers as safe.
I want her to register all three of us that way.
The shop door opens.
Mila steps out into the afternoon sun in the white-and-yellow dress, the teal-boxed package under one arm and the small afternoon sunlight finding her hair in the way that good light finds things it likes. She looks up and sees me against the wall and the expression she makes is?—
She looks caught.
The specific expression of someone who has just experienced something they weren't prepared for and is trying to decide how to carry it, the slightly dazed quality of a person who walked into a store expecting to not be allowed anything and walked out with two devices, their business plan endorsed by a financial strategist, and a pack making unhurried decisions about what she needs.
Her scent reaches me from three feet away.
The honey and vanilla are warm and full—not the muted, flattened version from last night but the actual signature, present and bright. The lime zest is there too, sharp and intermittent, the note that surfaces when something has caught her genuinely rather than pragmatically. She smells like someone whose body has decided it's in a situation worth responding to.
Declan and Rowan emerge behind her.
Rowan carries the second bag. Of course he does—he said go outside and I went outside and while I was experiencing my outdoor emotional journey he apparently collected the bags, paid, and is now fully in possession of the afternoon's transactions without having made any visible effort.
"Thank you," Mila says, to the three of us collectively, and the way she says it—not the service-register thank you, not the polite social convention—carries the specific weight of someone who means it more than the words and doesn't have other words available. "For all of this."
Declan moves her hair.
The two-finger tuck behind her ear, the same gesture from the hotel couch and the dress shop, and his hand stays near her face for a moment after, his expression doing the thing it does when he's made a decision and is letting it exist before acting on it.
"Let us," he says simply. "Just let us."
