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“You drooled,” Neysa said.

“I did not.”

“You did.”

“Shut up.”

The house was quiet. A plate covered with a dish towel waited on the counter. Voices murmured somewhere beyond the kitchen, but Knox was not among them.

I followed the late-afternoon light through the kitchen and found him on Guy’s porch.

He wasn’t brooding. That was the difference. He sat on the top step with his forearms resting on his knees, watching the desert turn copper under the lowering sun and listening to a silence that did not ask anything from him.

I sat beside him.

After a while, Knox said, “I believe I promised you a date.”

“You said you’d like to take me on one.”

He turned toward me. I remembered the exact wording because, of course, I did.

He smiled. “I would.”

“Good. Because I’ve already invested heavily in this relationship.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I fought Hell before breakfast… Before caffeine… Before carbs.”

The humor eased out of his face, not gone, only set aside. He looked back toward the desert for one breath before he said, “Sully says you’re our Mate.”

“Finally,” Neysa said.

“Don’t start.”

Knox continued before I could joke my way out of the moment. “But Fate doesn’t get to answer for you.”

There it was. The whole impossible point of us. The Universe might have made me for him and him for me… But choice made the relationship.

“Neysa knew, too. She’s been insufferably smug about it.”

“Accurate is not smug.”

I held Knox’s gaze. “I don’t belong to you.”

He did not flinch. “I know.”

“You don’t belong to me.”

“I know.”

I stood and stepped closer. “But I can choose you.”

He rose with me. “Do you?”

“Yeah, Dead Guy. I choose you.”

His answer came without hesitation. “I choose you, too.”