“The sign?”
“Yes, the sign.”
He gestured at the tree. “You made it sound like a joke when we were kids, how you wished I’d woo you. It wasn’t a joke. You thought a grand gesture of love was romantic. I wanted to give you one.”
The marker paused. “Oh Nico.”
“I see who you are, Livvy.”
Her breathing came faster. “I don’t know—”
“What was our agreement?”
“Which one?”
“The original one. All those years ago, when you sent me that first message.”
“One night.” She swallowed, audibly. “No one will know.”
“That agreement, you were right, it wasn’t healthy for us. And yet, there were some years of my life when that night with you was the highlight of twelve months.”
She was silent above him. He was barely clothed, and every word stripped him down further. He welcomed the vulnerability. Like the pain of confronting his father, it felt productive. “When Eve was sick, I didn’t leave her side for a night, except for those ten hours with you. You gave me the strength to go back to the hospital and sleep on that couch in the pediatric ward for weeks.”
“I did?”
“You did.” He breathed deeply, releasing the protective mechanisms he’d carried all his life. “You’re not my secret anymore. My love for you is bigger than anyone who might try to tear us apart.” He paused. “I won’t leave you, Livvy. You don’t have to trust me completely right now, but watch me. Watch me fight for you this time.”
A drop of wetness fell on his back. Since she was still drawing, he didn’t turn around, though he hated the thought of her weeping. “Your family—”
“My father knows. He knew before I came to you yesterday. He’s the only one who would disapprove of us, and I am done living my life so it revolves around him. You’re my family. You always have been. I promise you won’t have to carry the emotional load this time.”
She didn’t speak, but the marker lifted from his skin. “I’m done.”
He tried to crane his neck around, but the drawing was out of his range of eyesight. “I can’t see. My phone’s over there. Can you take a picture?”
She stretched over him to grab his phone from where it sat on his neatly folded clothes. “What’s your password?”
His first instinct was to tell her he would enter it, but he swallowed the urge down. Quietly, he rattled the numbers off.
The phone slipped out of her hands. “How long has that been your password?”
“Always,” he admitted. He used different passwords or combinations for various other stuff, but the things that were personal—his phone, his home—they were all protected by some variation of Livvy’s birthday.
“Jackson said it was your home security system code. I didn’t fully believe him.”
“It was.” He’d changed it after Jackson had broken in, and resented the younger man every time he had to type in the new randomly generated code. “Now take a picture.”
She picked up the phone, fumbling as she entered the numbers. “I probably don’t want to know why Jackson knows the code to your home, do I?”
“Maybe not right now,” he conceded.
Livvy snapped a picture of his back and avoided his eyes when she handed the phone to him. “It’s a sketch,” she said defensively, like he would judge her.
It took him a second to understand what he was looking at. The drawing was rough, but even in the quick lines, he could see the beauty of the design.It was a compass, similar to the one on her back, though hers was dreamy and paint-splattered and colorful.
A crown capped theNat the top of thenortharrow. He used his fingers to zoom in on that crown. The outline of it consisted of precisely printed numbers. He had to tilt the phone to understand the significance. “It’s this place,” he said, with a sense of wonder. “The coordinates. You just came up with this on the fly? Like the mermaid or the fairy?”
She concentrated on capping the marker like it was imperative that the thing not dry out. “No. I thought of it a few years ago.”
