“I want to. Sunnie?—”
“Ross.”
“Stay.”
“I’m staying.”
“I mean it. Not the apartment. Not the week. Stay.”
She set her own fork down. She reached across the table and took my hand.
“Ross,” she said. “I left that cabin. I didn’t go back to Charlotte. I came here. I knew what I was doing when I set the bag down on your floor, and I knew what I was doing when I told Suri I wasn’t going with her. I’m not deciding right now. I decided yesterday on a rock.”
I looked at our hands. Hers was smaller than mine. The fingers were cold.
“I haven’t stayed anywhere,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’ve been about to leave Wildwood Valley three times in the last year.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you told me. At the spot. You said the river runs the same direction every day, and you said it like it was a thing you needed to be true.”
I let out a breath. “My partners have been watching me,” I said. “They knew. Wells handed me the keys to the truck because he knew you were at that cabin. They’ve been quietly arranging things around me for months because they thought I was going to take off.”
“And were you?”
I thought about it. “I was about to,” I said. “I think I was about to.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m not.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d be leaving something.”
She held my hand tighter.
“That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?” she asked. “You’ve been somewhere you didn’t think was yours. I’ve been someone Ididn’t think had a story. Neither one of us has been wrong about the other person. We’ve just been wrong about ourselves.”
I looked at her across the table in the half-unpacked apartment with the lamp on and the night coming in through the window. I’d been certain of her since I saw her on that road. I had not, until right now, been certain of myself.
“Stay,” I said again.
“Yes.”
I stood up. I walked around the table. She stood up too. I pulled her into me and held her against my chest and felt her arms wrap around me. We stood there in my kitchen for a long minute while I made the same decision over and over.
“I’m going to buy a house,” I said into her hair.
She laughed. “Right now?”
“This week.”
