“It’s perfect, Andrea.”
The way he said it, quiet, certain, like there was no other possible answer, made my throat tight. I took a sip of water and changed the subject before my eyes did something embarrassing.
“What kind of father do you want to be?”
He was quiet for a while, longer than I expected. The fairy lights caught the line of his jaw, the stubble he hadn’t shaved, the small scar on his eyebrow.
“Present,” he said finally. “My father was a King first. He was good at it, fair, the pack respected him. But I can count on one hand the number of times he was at dinner when I was growing up. He was always somewhere else, handling something, being needed by someone who wasn’t me.”
I watched him trace the edge of his glass with his thumb, the gesture he did when he was thinking hard about something he didn’t want to say out loud.
“My mother filled the gap with pressure, expectations, plans she made for my life before I was old enough to disagree. I grew up with a schedule instead of a childhood.”
“Finneas...”
“I don’t want your sympathy. I’m telling you so you understand.” He looked at the candle flame. “I don’t want that for Alex. I wantto be there. At breakfast, at bedtime. I want him to know what my voice sounds like when I’m not giving orders.”
“You give a lot of orders.”
“I’m working on it.”
“You told the waiter to adjust the candle placement when we sat down.”
“That was a suggestion.”
“It was an order delivered at suggestion volume.”
His mouth twitched. I was deflecting with humor because what he’d just said, the rawness of it, the image of a little boy eating dinner alone while his father ran a kingdom, had hit me somewhere I wasn’t ready to examine. My parents died when I was fifteen, but before that, before the accident, every single night was dinner together. My dad’s terrible cooking, my mom’s laughter, the porch swing afterward. I grew up knowing what love looked like because it was at the table every night. Finneas grew up knowing what duty looked like and learning that it meant being absent.
I reached across the table and took his hand.
His breath caught. I felt it in his fingers, the way they went still and then closed around mine, careful, like he was afraid of holding too tight. His palm was warm, calloused at the base of his fingers from all the repairs he’d done at Grandma’s house, and I laced my fingers through his and didn’t let go.
We stayed like that through dessert. His thumb traced slow circles on the back of my hand and I let him because it felt good and I was tired of pretending things that felt good were dangerous. Buddy snored under the table. One of the rescue dogs wandered over, rested its head on Finneas’s knee. He scratched its ears with his free hand without breaking eye contact with me, without letting go of my hand, without missing a beat. This man learned to cook pasta, named our son after my father, built me a shelter, and now he was scratching a rescue dog’s ears while holding my hand under fairy lights. I was so far past trouble it wasn’t even visible in the rearview.
We walked back to the house together. Slowly, neither of us rushing, the gravel crunching under our shoes. The estate was quiet, lights warm in the windows, the sky clear enough to see stars. Our hands weren’t touching but our arms were close, close enough that I could feel the heat of his skin through his sleeve, and neither of us closed the gap or widened it.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said.
“What?”
“Two years ago you couldn’t say more than three words to me at the office. Now you’re cooking pasta and stringing fairy lights.”
“People change.”
“You didn’t change. You just stopped hiding.” I glanced at him. “The grumpy CEO thing was always the disguise, wasn’t it? This is who you actually are.”
He didn’t answer right away. The gravel crunched under our feet.
“You’re the only person who ever saw through it,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t see through it. I complained about it to your dog form for two years.”
“And I listened to every word.”
“Which is creepy.”
“Which is devotion.”
