Could that be true? Could trust build more trust? Was awkward vulnerability the key to unlocking joy?
“Yes.” Yardley sounded like she was answering the questions in KC’s heart. “Tell me.”
“Well, I think it would be much better for him to meet you than it would be for you to meet him. He’s locked himself awayfrom life, and if he met you, he’d be forced to remember how big and lovely it can be, because no one can exchange even a few words with you and not feel like it’s important to live more. But yes. I will introduce you. It’s about time the different parts of my life got to know each other.”
KC took Yardley’s hand and pulled it to her chest. It felt like a kiss under a porchlight, the kind of sweet moment filled with butterflies that she’d never had. She pressed her forehead to Yardley’s, coming down from the glittery high of it. “That’s our practice round.”
Yardley leaned away, squeezed KC’s hand, and slid off the sofa. “I want to play in my room, but”—she smoothed her hands over her hair—“just this game. Just kissing in my bed and telling each other everything we should already know. No… sex.”
“Are you sure what you’re describingisn’tsex?”
Yardley laughed. “Let’s go find out.” She led KC out of the lounge and down a hallway to the room that Zinnia had given her, a narrow space with white-painted stone walls, a simple wooden dresser, and a bed with a white duvet. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she pushed off her shoes. “Lay down with me.”
KC was nervous. They’d never had this. They’d arrowed right at each other at that party because neither one of them had a future in mind. It was one reason why the certainty they’d felt at the party had never translated into the relationship the other needed.
They were nervous now because they were telling themselves the truth about what was at stake. Because they were acknowledging that they both needed something, and they didn’t know if they would get it.
KC was starting to see that love risked everything.
Gramercy had explained it as knowing that one of you had to leave first. When KC had told him she hated that, it was because she could only focus on the loss. She couldn’t see the magic of Gramercy and Lucas’s revelation, which was the choice to be together. The choice to accept that your love would extend far beyond life as you knew it and into experiences impossible to imagine.
It meant the willingness to tell someone you would bear the loss if they left first, just to have had the privilege of loving them.
She didn’t hatethat. At this point in her life—when she had uncoupled a canon from the top of an armored vehicle with a remarkable woman beside her—it was the only kind of love that felt remotely big enough. Yardley patted the mattress. “Let’s go, Officer.”
KC shut the door and turned the bolt. She took off her shoes and crawled onto the bed and wrapped herself around Yardley’s waist, smiling, tugging until Yardley fell into the circle of her arms.
Yardley’s face was close. She adjusted her position, pushed her knee between KC’s, and wiggled until she’d found the spot where she liked to rest her head, cradled in the crook of KC’s neck. She sighed. “I missed you. A lot.”
“I missed you, too.” She kissed the top of Yardley’s head. “But we didn’t geteverythingwrong, did we?” She pulled Yardley tighter against her. “Or this wouldn’t feel so excellent.”
Yardley rested her palm on KC’s chest, over her heart. “I will admit there were compensations for the grief we put each other through.”
“Are you going to ask me a question?”
They didn’t have much time. If Kris hadn’t insisted KC leaveher alone earlier so she could think, KC would be sitting in front of a computer right this minute.
As soon as Yardley’s plan fell into place, they’d be on another plane, or a train, or a helicopter, pursuing information that would lead them to Dr. Brown.
But not right now.
“Mmm.” Yardley’s voice was low but suspiciously alert. “I’m thinking.”
Yardley’s thinking tended to generate its own weather. This was not Yardley Whitmer thinking. “You’re stalling. You already know what you want to ask, you’re just working up the courage.”
Yardley lightly smacked her arm. “Don’t rush me. Do you want to get married?”
KC couldn’t be certain she’d heard right. Could a simple question rip the breath from her body?
“I’m not proposing. To be clear.” Yardley spoke in a rush. “But I’ve never asked you about it. Like we said in the linen closet, there was a lot of tense, uneasy silence around future conversations between us. Remember when I suggested the entryway should have a skylight so it wasn’t so dark?”
KC did remember. Prior to that moment, Yardley had made a few mild suggestions that KC had accepted gratefully as evidence she’d failed to navigate some part of adulthood correctly. Updating the hand towels in the kitchen, for instance. That had been easy to do. But the suggestion of the skylight fell in a different category, a big and permanent change to the house where—with the exception of her years in Boston at MIT—KC had always lived. The house that had never, in her memory, changed at all.
Yardley hadn’t been calling contractors. She’d floated the ideaimpulsively, but KC had shot it down like a clay pigeon at the rifle range, her heart exploding to pieces in her chest.
She’d asked Yardley to move in with her, but she had never really believed that Yardley wouldstay.
Overfocus, stoic self-sacrifice, aggressive independence, and silently waiting for the worst to happen—that was how KC had gotten through every challenge life put in front of her. But she couldn’t love Yardley that way.
