When I moved, it was unhurried and deliberate, each stroke measured, like I had something to prove that couldn't be rushed. She matched my rhythm with an ease that felt like muscle memory, her hips rising to meet mine, her hands tracing slow paths across my back.
She whispered my name twice more before the end. The second time broke me.
I followed her over the edge with my face buried in her hair, her name in my mouth, and relief at no longer having to fight for the only thing I'd ever wanted.
Afterward, we lay in the pink lamplight with her head on my chest and the ceramic cats on the shelves, their unblinking eyes making me feel as though I were still under interrogation.
"We have an audience," she said.
"They're not judgmental. They're supportive."
She laughed, and I felt it against my ribs, and it was the best thing I'd felt in weeks.
Outside, Sofia's kitchen light went off. A pointed commentary, probably.
"Are you sure?" Nadia said after a while.
I looked down at her. "About what, specifically?"
"About us. About this. About staying." She was looking at the ceiling, not at me, which told me how much the question had cost her to ask. "I need to know you won't wake up in six months and decide you've failed me somehow and disappear again. I can't do that again, Daemon."
I thought about what I'd said in the parking lot. About the math only working one way.
I thought about my mom's headstone, and the crow, and Sofia's story about her husband who'd almost not asked because he thought she deserved someone with more to offer.
I thought about what Malakai had said. About deserving her instead of protecting her from me.
"I'm sure," I said. "I've never been surer of anything." I tightened my arm around her. "You're it for me, Nadia. You've been it for me since that warehouse. I just needed to catch up with myself."
She was quiet for a heartbeat. Then she pressed a kiss to my chest, right above where everything that mattered was located, and settled back against me.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." I could hear the smile in it. "Don't make me say it again."
Outside, the night settled around Sofia's garden. Somewhere in the main house, a radio came back on.
I lay in the pink-lit dark with Nadia warm against my side, the ceramic cats watching, and the needlepoint sampler above the headboard proclaiming HOME SWEET HOME in its cheerful, aggressive cross-stitch.
For the first time in a long time, it felt like it meant something.
The Sunday before Lindsey Hunter's book launch, Nadia came over with a box.
Not a moving box. A medium-sized cardboard one with the logo of the dry goods supplier she used, which she set on my kitchen table before saying, "I brought some things I thought might work in here."
I looked at the box. Then at her. "Work in here how?"
"Small things." She opened the flaps. Inside: a cast iron trivet shaped like a sunflower that had been sitting on her commercial kitchen windowsill, a paperback novel she'd read twice and wanted somewhere it would get used, and a jar of the specific coffee she preferred that I'd never sourced correctly on my own. "Not a takeover. Just. Things that are mine, in a place where I spend time."
I looked at the trivet. I looked at the coffee.
"The trivet goes on the stove," I said. "Where do you want the book?"
She let out a breath she'd been holding for what sounded like a while. "Wherever there's room."
There was room everywhere. Sofia's apartment had shelves running most of the way around the living area, interrupted only by the window and the ceramic cats. We found a spot on the shelf nearest the window and put the book there, spine facing out, then stood back and looked at it the way people look at new things in familiar spaces, checking whether they fit.
