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I hear the slow tread of boots across the porch before I feel him behind me. His hands slide gently around my waist, tentative but certain, like he’s afraid I’ll shatter but he’s not letting me go.

“I’m not walking away,” he says into my hair, low and rough. “Not this time.”

I want to believe him.

God, I do.

But belief is a dangerous thing when you’ve been burned by it before.

So I press my lips together and say the thing I’ve been trying to swallow since the second he opened that damn front door.

“And if you wake up one day and change your mind?”

His arms stiffen around me but he drops them when I turn to face him.

I don’t give him time to soften the blow. “What if this house, this future, all of it is just a moment for you? A good stretch. A phase. And then one day you wake up and realize you’re not built for it, and you walk out like you did before?”

Fletch pulls away like I’ve slapped him. He takes two steps back and stares at me like I just lit the match to the future he’s trying to build.

“Mya,” he says tightly. “Don’t.”

“I have to.” My voice is shaking now. “Because I can’t keep pretending like none of it happened. Like I didn’t spend months trying to figure out what I did wrong to make you stop looking at me. Like you didn’t check out and vanish when I needed you most.”

His chest rises and falls, sharp and uneven. His jaw clenches like he’s holding back a scream.

“You think I wanted to disappear?” he snaps. “You think it was easy for me? Being around you—being around us—and knowing I was screwing it all up?”

“I think you gave up!” I fire back, heart pounding. “I think you got scared, and instead of facing it, you buried your head in your music and left me to carry everything alone.”

“Because I didn’t know how to do it!” he explodes. “I didn’t know how to be enough for you, for them. For any of it.”

His voice breaks and something in me stutters.

“I was scared,” he says, quieter now. Shaking. “But not like before. Not the kind of scared you’re talking about. You want to know what real fear is, Mya?”

I can’t speak. Can’t breathe.

“It’s getting a call at two in the morning from a nurse who can’t even tell you if the woman you love is going to make it.It’s sitting in a hospital waiting room for seven hours not knowing if your kids—your sons—are going to survive. It’s seeing you unconscious, hooked up to machines, and praying to a God I stopped believing in just to get one more chance to fix what I broke.”

His hands are clenched at his sides now, eyes wild with grief and fury and love.

“You think I’m going anywhere?” His voice cracks. “Mya, I already lost you. I already lived my worst fear. And if I had to go through that again—if something happened to you—there’s nothing left of me after that. I wouldn’t come back from it. So no. I’m not leaving. Not now. Not ever.”

His words crash into me like a tide I wasn’t ready for—violent and unrelenting. But instead of pulling back, he stands there, chest heaving, hands shaking like he’s still half-trapped in that night. In that waiting room. In that version of hell I was too unconscious to remember.

But he remembers. Every second of it.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

“You think that erases what came before?” I ask, not because I want to hurt him—but because the wound in me still bleeds when I poke it, and I don’t know how to stop poking. “You think because you stayed when I was unconscious, it makes up for the way you looked through me when I was still awake?”

His eyes flinch like I’ve cut deep. I don’t stop.

“I needed you back then too. I needed you when I was scared out of my mind, pregnant and overwhelmed and feeling like a stranger in my own body. And you just… faded. You got cold. Distant. You shut me out and shut down, and I didn’t even know why.”

He steps toward me. Not fast. Not angry. Just… wrecked.

“I was drowning, Mya.”