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"Are you happy there?" she asks, before I've said much of anything.

"I think I could be," I tell her.

"Then that's your answer," Erica says.

"You'll be taken care of, and you'll take care of yourself, which is the part I've never once worried about. We'll visit. Hannah's already asking whether you'll need a nanny who can travel."

When I hang up, the house is quiet. I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone in my lap and let myself feel it fully for the first time. The fear I've carried for so long is gone. I know where I want to be. I know what I want to build. And I know who I want beside me while I build it.

I pick up the phone again and text Ross:

Blaire: Are you awake? I need to see you.

His answer comes before I can set the phone down.

Ross: Always.

Chapter Forty-Two

Ross

She knocks on the door of my study ten minutes later, barefoot, in one of my sweaters, with her hair damp from the shower. She closes the door behind her and leans against it, and for a moment she just looks at me across the room as though she's memorizing something.

"We're not flying home on Sunday,” she says.

I set down my pen.

"When do you want to fly home?"

"Not until the end of next week. The boys will still have time to get ready for school in San Francisco. And then in January, we're coming back." She takes a breath.

"For good. I want the practice, Ross. I want London. And I want you. On my terms, but I want all of it."

I don't trust my voice, so I don't use it. I stand, and she crosses the room before I can come around the desk.

"There's something I need to say first," she tells me, stopping just in front of me.

"Keeping the boys from you was wrong. I'm not going to explain it away. I was terrified, and I made a choice out of fear, and you're the one who paid for it. I'm not asking you to tell me it was okay."

"It wasn't okay," I say quietly.

"But I understand why you were afraid. I gave you every reason to be."

She nods, and her eyes fill. Then she reaches up and lays her palm flat against my chest, over my heart.

"I love you," she says.

Everything in me goes still. I've waited so long to hear those words from her that some part of me stopped believing I would.

"I loved you then," she says, her voice unsteady, "and I never stopped. Not for a single day. I tried. I told myself I'd moved on, and I built a whole life around that story. But no one has ever come close to you, Ross. No one has ever made me feel the way you do. No one has ever made me this happy." She swallows hard.

"When you ended it, I thought I hadn't been enough. I thought I was something you had to set aside so you could do what was expected of you. I've carried that for a long time."

I take her face in both hands.

"You were never something I set aside. You were never a distraction," I tell her.

"My mistake was believing that loving you and taking care of my family were two different things, and that I could only choose one. I was wrong. I'm choosing both, Blaire. I'm choosing you. I love you. I've never loved anyone else, the way that I love you.”