"See you this afternoon," he says. His voice hums against my hair.
He goes. And then Jace is there, quick, his hands finding my waist as he spins me around to face him. He grins, drops a kiss on my mouth, fast and warm and tasting like coffee, and then another on my jaw, and then he whispers, "Miss me," against myear, and he's gone before I can respond, jogging after Reid with the screen door banging behind him.
I stand at the sink with ghost of two different kisses on my skin and something expanding in my chest that is too large for the careful life I built and too real to put back.
The house goes quiet.
I wash the dishes. Dry them. Put them away. Then I go to the office, open my laptop, and try to disappear into work.
It takes a while. The illustrations come slowly at first, my hand following muscle memory while my mind circles the same territory. The secret. Owen's absence. The two kisses. Jace's whisper in the dark. But the work has its own gravity, and eventually the fox kit on my screen starts to breathe, starts to have weight and texture, and my thoughts narrow to the specific problem of getting the light right on its fur, the way morning sun would catch the red and turn it copper at the edges.
I work through the morning. Through lunch, which I forget to eat. Through the early afternoon, when the light in the office shifts from bright to golden and the shadows of the pines outside the window lengthen across the floor. The fox kit is done. The meadow behind it is done. I'm working on the border illustration, thistle and wild sage, when I realize I've been productive in a way I haven't been in weeks.
The office is quiet. The house is quiet. The only sound is my pencil on the tablet and the distant, occasional call of a bird outside the window.
The door opens.
Not gently. The door swings wide, fast, hitting the wall behind it, and Owen is standing in the frame.
He's breathing like he's been moving fast. His jacket is still on, collar up against the cold he's brought in from outside. His hair is windblown. His blue eyes are fixed on me with an intensitythat erases every careful, bounded version of him I've catalogued since I arrived.
This is not the Owen who moves through the world like someone trying to take up as little space as possible.
Something broke while he was gone.
I stand up from the desk. My pencil clatters against the tablet. I don't pick it up.
He doesn't speak. He stands in the doorway and looks at me and the silence between us is the loudest thing in the house.
One second. Two.
He crosses the office in four strides. His hands come up and frame my face, both palms against my jaw, fingers in my hair, and he pulls me to him and kisses me.
Not carefully. He kisses me like a man who has been holding his breath for weeks and has finally, finally stopped.
His mouth is warm. His hands are shaking. And I don't hesitate.
I kiss him back.
23
OWEN
I've been sitting in this truck for eleven minutes.
Engine off. Windows up. Parked on the ridge where the access road levels out before the final descent to the cabin. From here I can see the roof, the chimney trailing woodsmoke, the warm glow of the office window where the afternoon light hits the glass at an angle that turns it gold.
She's in there.
Maya works in the office from mid-morning until the light changes. She takes her laptop to her desk. She drinks coffee until noon, then switches to tea. She talks to herself when she's deep in an illustration, small murmurs I can hear when I'm at my own desk.
Twelve minutes now.
I left before dawn. Drove to the Flathead Lake overlook and sat there in the dark and watched the water turn from black to grey to blue while I tried to organize what is happening inside me into something I can manage. I am good at managing. I builtthe financial architecture that keeps a successful gear company operational. I have managed complexity my entire adult life.
I cannot manage this.
The facts are simple.
