“That’ll eventually wash off,” I say, “But I’ll keep drawing it until I can find a real one. A small one, but real. I don’t know how. I’ll figure it out. But that’s my promise to you.”
She looks at the ring. Turns her hand in the moonlight. The heart catches the pale glow and holds it.
“I’m so sorry about Whit,” I say. “And the baby. Fuck, I’m so sorry, Celeste. I want to reach inside and hold your heart because I know it’s about to break apart. But try to remember it doesn’t erase what we’ve built. And it doesn’t change what’s ahead. If you want to be a mum—” I turn to face her fully. My hand on her knee. My eyes on hers. “Then let’s do it. You and me. Our own family. Not because someone wrote it in a will. Because we chose it. With each other.”
She’s quiet for a long time. The house settles around us. Somewhere down the hall, Mum shifts in her sleep and the bedframe creaks—a small, domestic sound, proof that we’re not alone even when it feels like it.
“Do you actually want this?” Celeste’s tone is careful. Guarded. Protecting something she can’t afford to lose again. “Or do you just pity me? Because from where I’m sitting, I’m an older woman whose company just imploded, whose best friend is gone, who just lost a custody case, and who is—by any objective measure—the saddest person you’ve ever met. You don’t have to save me, Saylor. That’s the whole point of what you said tonight. You don’t want to be saved and neither do I. So if this is a rescue mission, tell me now.”
“It’s not pity.” I say it simply because simple is all I have left. “And it’s not a rescue. It’s destiny, Celeste. You’re my boat. But here’s the part I didn’t say before.” I take her other hand so I’mholding both. “I’m your boat too. That’s how it works. We don’t just save each other. We refuse to let the other one drown.”
She looks at me. At the marker on her finger. At the empty room that was supposed to hold a baby and now holds only us and the quiet wreckage of a plan that fell apart and the first, fragile scaffolding of a new one.
I kiss her. Slow this time. Not the quick peck from the driveway, the compressed promise between two people mid-fight. This one is unhurried. Tender. The kind of kiss that doesn’t demand anything, that just says: I’m here. I’ll be here tomorrow. And the day after that, and the one after that, for as many days as you’ll let me.
When I pull back, her forehead rests against mine.
“Tomorrow is going to be hard,” I say.
“I know.”
“And the day after.”
“I know that too.”
“But tonight, you’re not doing any of it alone. Yeah? We’ll sit in the gray area together.”
“Gray area?” she asks.
“Something my mum used to say. The gray area is when you’re at the end of something awful breaking apart, but you’re also on the cusp of something beautiful coming together. All you can do is sit with it. That’s hard for a lot of people, to have hope when everything seems bleak.”
Celeste looks at me like she’s looking into my soul. Weighing something, sizing me up. A kiss on the cheek tells me she finds me more than worthy to be by her side. “The gray area isn’t so bleak if you’re sitting in it with the right person.”
I nod. “Exactly.” Her hand tightens around mine. The marker heart presses between our palms—a ring drawn in the dark, a promise made on the floor, a future sketched in Sharpie that will fade from her skin long before it fades from her heart.
We sit there. Two people on the floor of an empty room, holding hands in the moonlight, letting the worst day end the only way it can.
Together.
chapter 21
Saylor
Look away, *NSYNC. This is about to get inappropriate.
Justin Timberlake stares down at me from the poster on the guesthouse wall with his frosted tips and his denim-on-denim commitment, and I would apologize for what he’s about to witness except I’m too busy kissing Celeste’s neck at six in the morning in her childhood bed while the sunrise turns the bubblegum-pink walls the color of a blush.
She’s half asleep. Or she was, until I started tracing my mouth along the curve of her shoulder, down the line of her collarbone, across the soft skin just above her breast. She shifts against me, arching into the contact with the drowsy instinct of a body that has spent the past few weeks remembering what touch is for.
Celeste hasn’t been going to the office. She needs time and space, so she’s home—here in Westchester. And there’s not much to do in Westchester…except fuck. All hours of the night and day. And somehow, even during one of the most tumultuous times in our lives, it’s a little slice of paradise.
“Saylor.” Her voice is thick with sleep. “It’s before seven.”
“I’m aware.”
“The sun isn’t even fully up.”
“It’s getting there. So am I.”
