My chest feels hollowed out from the inside. Not pain exactly, but something worse. The kind of emptiness that comes when you’ve already seen the life you want and know it might never be yours.
I can see it with brutal clarity. Her tangled in our sheets, barefoot in the kitchen with paint on her fingers, her beautiful voice drifting through the house late at night, her laughter cutting through the quiet in a way that makes everything feel warmer, safer, whole.
I don’t just want her in our bed. I want her in our lives.
“She was it for me,” I say quietly, the words heavier than I expected. “That first night at the bar. Watching her hustle us at pool like she had nothing to lose. I remember thinking I’d never met anyone like her.”
Mason lets out a slow breath beside me. “For me, it was the café when she sneezed all that powdered sugar on me.”
“The ferry,” Slater adds.
Jasper’s jaw clenches. “I knew the second I kissed her. There wasn’t a question after that. There was just her.”
“So what now?” I ask, because wanting her doesn’t solve anything. “How the hell do we move forward from this?”
Mason rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “We talk to her and see how everything feels now that the truth is out.”
Jasper’s gaze drops to the floor. “Could any of us even let her walk away for good?”
The idea lands like a blade between my ribs.
“Fuck no,” I answer, mirrored by Mason and even Slater.
“Could you actually do that?” I ask him. “Walk away and never see her again?”
“No.”
I nod, because none of us could. “She belongs with us,” I state. “And whether she knew it or not, we belong with her. That doesn’t disappear because everything got complicated.”
“I need to decide if I can trust what I felt,” Slater says. “If I can believe it wasn’t all built on something false. But I’m not walking away,” he says. “I’m not ready to step forward yet either.”
And that’s enough for now.
The snow continues to fall outside, and I can’t help but wonder where Anita is right now. If she’s warm enough, safe, crying alone in her apartment.
My chest aches at the thought.
She might have lied to us and broken something fragile between us. But she’s still ours. And I’m not ready to accept a world where we don’t fight for her.
21
MASON
We’re all home in the mansion, but it doesn’t feel like home tonight.
It’s hollow, as if something vital is missing, and we all know exactly what that something is.
Whothat something is.
Slater is sitting in the leather armchair near the fireplace, nursing a whiskey. The amber liquid catches the firelight, throwing golden reflections along the glass. The flames cast flickering shadows across his face, making his expression even harder to read than usual. He’s been sitting there for the past hour, barely moving, just staring into the fire. He’s somewhere else entirely. Somewhere dark and painful, if the tension in his shoulders is any indication.
Outside, snow is coming down hard. Fat, wet flakes that stick to the windows and pile up on the deck railing.
Dylan is in the kitchen, baking. Again. It’s what he does when he needs to distract himself, when his emotions get too big to contain and he needs something productive to channel theminto. Based on the smell filling the house—sweet and rich and overwhelming—we’re going to have about twenty banana cakes by morning. Maybe more.
Jasper is crashed on the couch, scrolling through his phone. He’s wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt, and he’s been unnaturally quiet since we got back. Withdrawn.
And me? I’ve been pacing for the last thirty minutes, wearing a path in the expensive rug, unable to sit still, unable to settle. The anxiety is clawing at me, at all of us, this heavy weight pressing down on my chest that makes it hard to breathe properly.
