Honey’s chest ached. It was too easy to picture the way the girls must’ve looked standing there, small and wide-eyed and not understanding where their mother had gone. Ethan had made an impossible choice and had been living inside the fallout ever since.
“So when you came here,” he said, “talking about order and rules and how if we just followed the right steps, everything would turn out fine…”
He looked at her. “It felt like you were saying everything I already hated myself for. Because that’s what I did. I followed the steps. I did what I thought was right. And I still lost her. My girls still lost their mom.”
Honey’s chest tightened. She wanted to take back every tidy plan and careful rule she’d laid out like they were some kind of cure. For the first time, she understood why he’d shut the door in her face that first day. It wasn’t just resistance he’d been giving her. It was guilt.
“She can’t be really lost,” Honey said. “If she was taken into custody, there must be some kind of record.”
“That’s the thing,” Ethan said. “She was released from custody. She just didn’t come home.”
Her throat ached. She wanted to reach for him, to insist there had to be another explanation, but the devastation in his eyes made her still.
“Believe me. I’ve done everything I could. I’ve been looking for her every spare moment that I’m not working or taking care of the girls. Because I thought if I could just find her, maybe I could fix it. Maybe I could undo the worst mistake I ever made.” His voice thickened. “I’ve been trying to hold this whole thing together on my own because, deep down, I didn’t think I deserved help.”
Since she met him, she had thought of him as an immovable stone, but here he was, cracked open in front of her, and all she wanted was to press her hands to the fault lines and hold him together. She stepped closer, her heart pounding in her ears. He wasn’t just giving her facts now. He was giving her his shame. The private, unvarnished truth he had buried under all that grit.
“I never wanted your help,” he added, laughing weakly through a sniffle, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand.
She let out a breath, somewhere between a laugh and a cry. “So you said.”
“But you helped anyway. You didn’t just make chore charts or rearrange the kitchen. You made this place feellike a home again. What I’m trying to say is,” His eyes met hers. “I want you to stay.”
Honey’s heart thudded painfully in her chest. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to fall into whatever this was and not think about the consequences. But she couldn’t forget what was coming.
“You’re going to lose your home.”
“I know.”
“I have a life in the city.”
“I know that too.”
She shook her head. “I can’t stay.”
He nodded slowly. “Just a couple more days. I know we can’t save this place, but we can give the girls a proper goodbye. Let them remember it not as the place they lost, but as the place we loved.”
Honey’s eyes burned as tears formed.
“And not just for them,” he added, his voice barely above a whisper. “I need it too. I want to say goodbye to this place with you here.”
She blinked back tears. “So we pretend, for a little while, that it’s all going to be okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Just for a little while.”
A long silence stretched between them.
The clock ticked in the kitchen. Wind rustled softly through the cracked window. Ethan’s breath hitched.
Then his hand came up, rough and calloused, brushing against her cheek. The strange squawk of the cuckoo clock broke through the quiet, a sound that had startled her once but no longer did. Now it was almost fitting, a reminder that time kept moving even when the rest of the world stood still. It wasn’t the beginning of something, and they both knew it. It was a moment borrowed against time.
His gaze lingered on her mouth, then flicked upto her eyes, asking. Her fingers curled in the fabric of his shirt. And she answered without words, closing that last inch.
The kiss was soft, as though they might shatter if they pressed too hard. He kissed her like he was memorizing, like he knew he didn’t get to keep her, and she kissed him back like she’d been starved for gentleness and had finally found it.
When they came together, they didn’t say anything else.
They didn’t need to.
