Page 153 of Honeyfires

"Together?" she said.

"Together," I said.

We got in the car. She didn't start the engine right away, just sat with her hands in her lap and the afternoon light coming through Daisy's windshield.

"I'm coming with you," she said.

I turned to look at her.

"If you take the transfer. I'm coming with you." She met my eyes. "Copper Valley probably has a library. Or needs one. And I have been wanting to try something new." She paused. "And you are my home, Petra. Wherever you go."

I stared at her for a long moment. This woman who had stepped in front of me in a grocery store, who had gone to my lawyer and made a legal argument, who had published an op-ed with her full name on it, who had waited in a hallway for four hours surrounded by firefighters she'd made cookies with, who had sat on a bathroom floor at 2 AM and then gotten back up.

My Honeyfires.

"You'd move," I said. "For me."

"You moved for me once," she said. "And look how that turned out."

I laughed. She smiled at the sound of it.

I took her hand. She started the engine. And we drove back toward San Jacinto together, toward the apartment that had my boots lined up by the door and her dresses between my uniforms and the label-maker I was never going to apologize for, toward the last night before we started figuring out what came next.

The desert spread out around us, vast and patient and gold in the late afternoon light, the way it always was, long before any of this and long after.

The apartment was very still when we got home. Vera turned to look at me.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

She crossed the small distance between us and put her arms around my waist, her face pressing into my neck, and I held her. Just that. For a long time, just that; her weight against me, her breath warm and even, the vanilla-coconut scent of her hair, the particular solidity of her small body fitting against mine the way it always had, from the first time I'd carried her down the hall, from every night since.

"We're okay," she said into my neck.

"We're okay," I agreed.

She pulled back just enough to look at me. Her eyes were bright, not with tears exactly, with something more complex than tears. Relief and grief and something that had been building all day, in the hallway outside the hearing room and in the car and in the moment she'd said I'm coming with you like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Come here," she said.

She took my hand and led me to the bedroom, and there was nothing urgent in it. No desperation, no need to outrun anything. Just her hand in mine and the afternoon light coming through the yellow curtains, golden and warm and quiet.

She sat me down on the edge of the bed and stood between my knees, her hands on either side of my face, and looked at me for a moment the way she sometimes looked at books she loved.

"You did it," she said softly.

"We did it."

"You." She pressed her forehead to mine. "You stood up there and told the truth and you didn't flinch. Not once." Her thumbs moved over my cheekbones. "I was so proud of you. I'm so proud of you."

I closed my eyes. "I kept thinking about you. Every time I wanted to stop, I found you in the back row."

"I know." She kissed me. "I could tell."

"I'm here," I said. "I'm completely here."

I was.