I don’t try to fix it or reach for words to make it smaller, easier, or more manageable. I simply sit with her in it, because sometimes that’s all you can do for someone, and sometimes it’s enough.
After a while, she brings one hand up and wipes her face. “Thank you for telling me that,” she whispers.
“He meant it. Every word.”
She nods and looks back at the fire.
We sit in silence again, the good kind, the kind that holds rather than presses, while the embers shift and the stars burn bright above the desert, and Memphis snores at our feet.
Eventually, leaning forward, I set my bottle on the low table between our chairs.
Sophia reaches for hers at the same moment.
Her fingers brush mine in the dark, brief, light, and completely accidental, just a moment of warmth over cool glass before we both register what has happened and pull back without a word.
Neither of us says anything.
Neither of us looks at the other.
We sit back and look out at the open land like nothing has happened, the fire burning lower between us, the night pressing in from every side.
Chapter Nine
SOPHIA
I say goodnight not long after.
I’m not sure exactly what makes me stand up when I do. Some instinct that tells me it’s time.
Picking up my bottle, I say, “Goodnight, Tate.”
He looks up at me from his chair, firelight catching the angles of his face. “Goodnight, Soph. Sleep well.”
Crossing back to my room, I slide the glass door closed behind me, setting my bottle on the dresser and standing there for a moment in the quiet.
The night is still outside. The pool shimmers softly beyond the sliding doors, casting slow, shifting light across the wall beside me. Taking it in for a moment, I move to the nightstand.
The photograph catches my eye first—the photograph of Ryan, Tate, and me. I look at it for a beat before picking up the stack of books beside it.
It Ends With Us. Beautiful Disaster. The Notebook.
Turning each one over slowly, I read the back covers in the low lamplight. The woman at the bookstore had clearly known her audience. These were exactly the kind of books I would have chosen for myself once, without hesitation or a second thought. I used to devour books like these and lose entire weekends to them, curled up on my couch in Vixen Falls with a coffee going cold on the table beside me, completely unreachable until I’d turned the last page.
Happily ever after feels different now, but not impossible. I’m not ready to believe that yet, but it isn’t as far away as it used to be. It’s like something seen from a distance rather than something you can simply reach out and take.
Running my fingers across the covers one more time, I set them back down. Then, I sit on the edge of the bed and look around the room properly, really looking at it the way I hadn’t been able to when Tate first showed me in, when everything was still too new and too much to absorb fully.
It’s a beautiful room. Simple, warm, and thoughtfully put together, not in the way of a hotel with all matching surfaces and impersonal comfort, but in the way some person had actually considered its design. The soft bedding, a warm lamp, the chair angled just right toward the pool, and the sliding doors that let the outside in without asking anything of you.
He’d thought about this.
A motorcycle club president who cooked ribeye steaks, went to a bookstore, asked a stranger what women liked to read, and then came home and arranged it all on a nightstand for a woman he barely knew.
Because he promised his brother.
Pressing my lips together, I look at the ceiling.
Ryan, I think.I hope you know how much I loved you.
