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I couldn’t imagine what it must’ve been like to lose figure skating when she’d been so talented. To think you had your whole life figured out and then lose the thing you were most passionate about. I loved hockey, but cooking was where my real passion lay. And still, if I lost either of those, I’d be gutted.

We walked a few more steps. The fake snow was lighter here, away from the main machines, drifting down in scattered flakes that caught the glow of the string lights.

“I keep waiting for it to stop hurting,” she said quietly.

I thought about Pop. About the way he still set two coffee mugs on the counter every morning, fifteen years after my grandmother passed. He didn’t do it on purpose. He’d told me once that his hands just remembered and he’d long given up on fighting it.

“I don’t think it stops,” I said. “I think it just changes shape.”

She considered that for a minute, her eyes on the street ahead of us. Then she slipped her hand down my arm until her hand slid into mine, our fingers interlacing.

Again, my heart picked up the pace. Her family wasn’t around to see our show. There was no audience to convince that we were a real couple.

It was just us.

And she’d still reached for me.

My thumb traced a slow circle against the back of her hand, and she didn’t pull away.

We stopped near the end of the block where the crowd had thinned. A string of white lights hung low between two lampposts, and somewhere behind us a choir had started singing.

Sam turned to face me, her eyes filled with a twinkle I hadn’t seen the entire time we’d been in Washington. “Thank you, Harry. For being here, for being my rock. You don’t even know how much I’ve needed⁠—”

“I told you, there’s no need to thank me. I want to be here.”

She shook her head. “But you gave up Christmas with your family to come play pretend with mine. That’s not⁠—”

“Sam.” I stepped closer. The fake snow kept falling between us, catching in her hair and on the shoulders of my hoodie that she’d claimed as her own. “Nothing about this has been pretend for me.”

The words came out before I could stop them or decide if the timing was right or calculate the risk. They just fell out of me, and once they were in the open, I couldn’t take them back.

I didn’t want to.

Her lips parted. Those blue eyes went wide, searching my face for a crack or some sign that I was playing a part.

She wouldn’t find one. If anything, this moment was a long time coming.

“What?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

I reached up with the hand not holding hers and brushed a fake snowflake from her hair. My fingers lingered against her temple for a beat longer than necessary, and her breath caught under my touch. Her eyes fluttered, just barely, and I watched the war I’d seen so many times play out across her face—the wanting and the fear, pulling her in opposite directions.

I wanted to kiss her. The urge was so strong it took everything I had to stay where I was. But I’d spent enough time reading Sam to know the difference between a wall coming down and a wall being tested. She was still testing. Still waiting for this to turn into something that would prove her right about not deserving it.

I wasn’t going to give her that proof.

So I did what I’d been doing since the music festival. Since the first time she’d called me Harry and I’d known, with the kind of certainty that doesn’t need evidence, that she was it for me.

I let my hand drop and gave her room to breathe.

“We should find your family,” I said, keeping my voice even.

Her expression cracked for just a second. Relief and disappointment and longing, all tangled up in a way that made my chest ache because I recognized it. I’d seen it in the park. In the alley outside Mira’s. Every time she got close to letting herself want this, she’d pull back because she was convinced she didn’t deserve it.

But she did. She deserved everything.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “We should.”

Then she squeezed my hand, turned, and we walked back toward her family. But unlike all the other times before, she didn’t let go.