“Your parents are really great,” I say.
She looks over at me, something fond settling into her expression. “They’re a lot.”
“Good a lot.”
Her mouth curves. “Yeah.” She lets out a slow breath, her exhale clouding in the cold. “My mom cried a little when she hugged me goodbye last time. She tried to hide it, but she’s terrible at it.”
I smile. “Wonder where you got that from.”
Harlow gives me a look. “I do not cry.”
“You absolutely cry.”
“Happy tears are different.”
“They’re still tears.”
She bumps her shoulder into my arm, and I catch her, drawing her into my side and pressing a kiss to her hair.
We stand there at the edge of the firelight for a while. The conversation around the bonfire moves the way conversations do on nights like this—easy and unhurried, people talking notbecause they have anything urgent to say, but because they want to stay close to each other.
Harlow shifts against me, and when I look down, she’s watching the water.
“I used to come down here when I needed to think,” she says.
“Yeah?”
She nods. “When things were bad. We moved here right after Kai left for college. We all needed a fresh start.” Her gaze stays fixed on the lake. “The ocean’s always been the place where I feel calmest—outside of the rink, anyway.”
Then she tips her head back to look at me.
“At least it was until you came along.”
My heart hits hard against my ribs, and I lean down to kiss her, brief and soft and full of everything I can’t fit into words fast enough.
“I love you.”
Her smile is small and real and still somehow capable of undoing me every time I see it. “I love you too, Gray.”
She’s quiet for a moment after that. Then she says, “I used to come down here and ask myself if I was going to be okay.”
My chest tightens.
I keep my voice gentle. “And?”
Her eyes lift to mine.
“I think I got my answer.”
I look at her, and she looks at me, and the firelight flickers in the space between us, and all I can think about is every version of her that got us here.
The girl on the bench outside the bookstore.
The one in the dining hall.
The one in her dorm room, telling me to stay like it cost her everything and nothing at all.
I think about every room she ever had to map before she could breathe inside it. Every small, quiet victory she never asked anyone to notice.
