“Yes.”
He nodded once, then again, slower. Organizing it. Making steps out of a cliff.
“Not tomorrow morning,” he said. “I need to sleep before walking into a room where someone might say the word recusal like it’s a weapon.”
“Not tomorrow morning.”
“But soon.”
“Soon.”
He looked at me then, really looked, and the force of it made the noise around us fade to something distant.
“We’re keeping it,” he said.
It was not bravado. It wasn’t a promise that everything would work out. It was a decision made with fear still sitting in his lap.
I felt it in my bones.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re keeping it.”
His mouth trembled at one corner before he pulled it under control. “Then we figure out how to tell the people who can take it away.”
I wanted to tell him they couldn’t. I wanted to give him something clean and absolute.
I didn’t.
Instead, I gave him the only honest thing I had.
“We tell them before they find out,” I said. “And we walk in knowing what we’re asking for.”
Jace reached for my coffee again, took a drink, and grimaced like it offended him personally.
“Fine,” he said. “Tonight we find lawyers. Then we decide how and when to disclose to ownership.”
I nodded.
Outside, afternoon light slid across the sidewalk, pale and cold. Jace sat across from me in my stolen hoodie with fear in his faceand steadiness under it, no longer asking whether this was real enough to risk the damage.
The damage was already part of the math.
Now we had to protect what was left.
Chapter 34
Chapter 34
JACE
By the time I got back to Declan’s house, my skin felt too tight.
Not in the good way. Not yet.
It was the other kind. The buzzing kind. The kind where my thoughts kept slamming into each other and none of them would take a number. Lawyer names. Ownership. Vanessa’s face when she realized the breakup was more than me being emotionally unavailable. Olivia asking Declan questions I had no right to hear. Roman knowing and not knowing. My dad not knowing anything at all.
I sat in my car outside Declan’s for two full minutes after I turned the engine off because I had arrived six minutes early and that somehow felt suspicious.
Six minutes early to my boyfriend’s house.
