“You better,” I said, my voice still trembling but now underpinned by something steadier—something solid, something that would endure. “Because I just told you I love you, and I’m not taking it back. And I’m not saying it again to a grave. You hear me?”
He smiled.
His hand covered mine where it rested against his cheek, his fingers curling around mine, pressing my palm closer. It was as if he craved the contact, as if he’d spent twenty miles in the dark dreaming of this exact moment.
“I hear you,” he said softly.
His silver eyes held mine, steady and full of something he’d spent a lifetime refusing to carry.
“And Libby?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you too.”
Fifty
Epilogue
The door slammed against the wall, rattling the lamp, and then Lily burst in. Barefoot, hair a wild mess, cheeks flushed as if she’d run a marathon, she held Doc Fluffbutt out with both arms, like presenting a Thanksgiving casserole.
“Mom! Oh my God—look!” she blurted, breathless, words tumbling out. Doc Fluffbutt hung suspended, his legs splayed at four impossible angles, his eyes open just enough to fix on her face and convey that he knew, he remembered, and he was keeping a record.
Libby blinked, her mind struggling to catch up. Half-tangled in Finn’s arms, her face damp with tears, body pressed against his, her brain couldn’t reconcile the raw intensity of the last twenty minutes with the sight of her daughter holding a cat.
Her eyes darted to Finn.
To the cat.
Back to Finn.
“You saved the damn cat?” she asked, her voice still rough from crying, still thick with everything that had just happened between them, and then she laughed.
Finn didn’t look remotely apologetic.
He shifted slightly against the headboard, one arm still draped around Libby’s waist, the other lifting in a lazy, unhurried shrug as he pushed a hand through his hair. His posture conveyed the casual indifference of a man who found nothing unusual about his choices.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rough with sleep and exhaustion, but carrying that dry, deadpan delivery she’d learned meant he found himself more amusing than anyone else in the room, “we’re battle buddies now. Doc and I survived a horde of the dead, crawled under a trailer together, and kayaked twenty miles in the dark. You don’t abandon a man after that. Even if he licks his own butt.”
Libby stared at him.
“You… what?”
A single, suspended beat stretched between them. Lily’s focus drifted from the cat to the man in the bed. Her eyes widened, her mouth falling open as the impossible registered. The cat was forgotten; Doc Fluffbutt scrambled free and landed with an indignant thump. For a half-second, she just stood there, staring.
Then she launched herself forward.
She crossed the space and threw herself at Finn with a force that knocked the breath from his lungs in an audible grunt, her arms wrapping around him, her face burying itself against his chest, her entire small body trembling with a violence that had nothing to do with cold.
“Thank you,” she cried, the words muffled against his shirt, wet and broken and fierce all at once. “Thank you, thank you,thank you—I’m so glad you’re okay—I thought you were—I thought—”
Finn’s breath caught—just for a moment, something raw flickering across his face before he could stop it—and then his arm came around her, pulling her in close.
He didn’t say anything for a second. Just held on.
“No man left behind, not even a cat,” he said, his attempt at humor fading. His voice lowered. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Doc Fluffbutt, momentarily abandoned and unimpressed by the emotional chaos unfolding around him, gave a single indignant meow that communicated volumes about his feelings regarding the quality of service on this island, then hopped onto the center of the bed with the proprietary confidence of a creature staking a permanent territorial claim and began grooming himself with aggressive nonchalance.
