"You're happy. It's loud." She burrows in closer. "Be happy quieter."
"Yes, ma'am."
She almost laughs—I feel it move through her against my chest—and then she goes heavier, and her breathing steps down into sleep.
I lie there with my hand on her back, my mother down the hall, and the woman I love asleep and safe andchoosingit, choosing me.
For the first time since I was twenty-five there's nothing at my back and nowhere on this earth I'd rather be than right here.
I don't sleep.
I keep watch over her instead.
Old habit. But there's no fear in it tonight.
Tonight I'm only a man guarding what he thought he'd buried ten years ago and got handed back anyway.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mila
Blinking a few times, I rub my eyes and look at the clock next to the bed.
10 AM.
Finn's gone—up before dawn the way he always is, but he left the lamp off so it wouldn't wake me.
He even folded his side of the blanket back over me so I'd keep the warmness of it.
There's a coffee on the crate by the bed gone cold hours ago because he made it and wouldn't wake me to drink it.
I lie there and look at the cold coffee for a long time.
For years I woke up every day already braced, already counting the exits before my feet hit the floor.
This morning I woke up slowly, in a warm bed, in a locked room, with a cold cup of coffee a man made me and then loved me enough to go get.
I press my face into his pillow. It smells like him.
I give myself ten more minutes of it, and then I get up, because I've never been a woman who lies in bed, and there's work that needs to be done.
There's a mirror over the little sink attached to his room, and I catch myself in it while I'm pulling my shirt on.
I stop.
I couldn't stand a mirror before.
Marie took hers down inside a week.
And I stand in Finn's room in the morning light and look at my own face on purpose, and it's still gaunt and there's still gray coming out from under my eyes—but my jaw isn't set.
My shoulders have come down off my ears.
There's a looseness through my mouth that wasn't in that face at the gate, and it takes me a second to place it, because I haven't worn it in so long.
It's a face that slept.
It's a face that got held all night by a man who didn't take one thing she didn't hand him.
