“All of those,” I say. “Shut up.”
She laughs, this bright, unstoppable thing, and I’m nowhere near done listening to that laugh or holding her or kissing her when a throat clears behind me, and I know exactly whose it is before I even turn around.
“Rowan.”
I turn and see my father, two feet away, and for the first time ever, I can’t read his face. Sloane doesn’t let go of my hand and she doesn’t step away, standing right beside me like I did with her a second ago.
“You cannot have just said that to Patrick Cross.” It’s the managing voice, the one that taught me to solve every problem. “I’ll make a call. This is fixable.”
“There’s nothing to fix,” I say, quiet and steady, because for once I’m not managing him, I’m just telling him. “Nothing broke.”
“Rowan, please…”
“You never told me I had cleared the bar, Dad. Not once. I’d hand you a win and you’d make the game harder, because you’re the level I don’t ever get to beat.”
“Rowan,” he says, the closest thing he gets to angry. “Everything I did, I did because you were the one thing in that house that?—”
He stops. The man who never fails to finish a sentence.
“I know,” I say, quieter than everything before it, because I do, and that’s the part I keep tripping on. “I know it was love. I genuinely do. I kept that house running quiet for both of you. I’m just telling you what it weighed.”
He looks at me. He looks at Sloane. He looks at our hands.
“Alright,” he says.
It’s flat — not approval, no warmth — but I’ve waited on some version of that word as long as I can remember, and I have neveronce watched my father set a thing down and walk away from it when he thought it needed doing.
“Alright,” I say back, holding out my hand.
He shakes it — hard, brief, the most he has — and turns and walks off into the crowd. My eyes sting and I let them. Because while it isn’t quite a “you’ve cleared it” it’s the closest he’s ever come, and I’ll take it.
Sloane’s hand squeezes mine. “You okay?” she says.
“No idea,” I say. “Bit of a mess.”
“You okay with that?”
“For now, yeah,” I say.
“Cool.”
A body slams into my back.
“BOYS.” Luca, at least one drink past sense. “This is happening.”
I sigh. “No…”
“The skipper is STAYING,” he bellows. “So we’re DANCING!”
“Luca…”
“I am not going to be the only one out there.” He rounds on Sloane. “Tell him.”
“He’s right,” she says, deadpan, and grins. “We’re dancing.”
As Sloane drags me along, Theo charges out to the dance floor, attempting a move he’s clearly practiced and which is, in execution, a public hazard — one knee going down, the other foot sliding across the polished wood, a half-second of genuine terror on his face.
I’m about to step forward to help when Niko, out of nowhere, catches Theo by the arm and hauls him upright without breaking stride or, somehow, breaking eye contact with the girl he’s been talking to all night — the barista from Maple & Main, working with the catering staff.
