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His lips twitched. “Yeah. Probably.”
Fifteen years of missed chances sat on the pier beside us. I looked out across the water, letting each piece settle. The scholarship. The farm. The Hope Center. The meals. The truck. All the invisible ways he’d been there without letting me see him.
“Lane?”
“Yeah, baby?” The endearment still did reckless things to my heart.
I swallowed. “Is that everything?”
The question hung between us. Immediately, something changed in his expression. My stomach dropped. Because suddenly I knew. There was more. A lot more. And whatever it was, it was the thing he’d been most afraid to tell me. Lane looked toward the horizon, the last rays of sunlight catching in his eyes. He took a slow breath.
“No,” he said quietly.
My heart skipped a beat.
“That’s just the beginning.” He reached for my hand and laced our fingers together. The words changed something between us. A few days ago, hearing that there was more would have terrified me. Now, sitting between Lane’s legs with his arms around me, I realized something that scared me even more. I looked down at our joined hands. His fingers were rougher than I remembered, but they still fit mine perfectly. Like they always had.
“Can I ask you something?”
His thumb brushed across my knuckles. “You can ask me anything.”
I turned enough to look at him. The fear was still there in his eyes—the fear that I would decide all of this was too much. My heart squeezed painfully. Because after everything he’d confessed, he still didn’t understand that he wasn’t the only one who had spent all these years holding on.
“Lane.”
“Yeah, baby?”
I took a deep breath. “What if we stopped talking about the past for a minute?”
Confusion flickered across his face. “What do you mean?”
I swallowed hard.
“I mean . . .” My voice wavered. “What if we talked about now?”
His entire body went still. I could practically feel his pulse jump beneath my fingertips.
“Cali . . .”
“What if,” I continued before I could lose my nerve, “instead of worrying about what happened when we were seventeen, we figured out what happens when we’re thirty-two?”
His eyes widened. For a moment, he simply stared at me, like he was afraid the words would disappear if he moved.
“I spent years convincing myself I could hate you.” His jaw clenched. “But I never once stopped loving you.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. The confession hung between us. I brushed my thumb along his jaw, letting the truth settle between us. “Maybe we both believed stories that weren’t true.”
His brows pulled together.
“I convinced myself you were better off without me,” I whispered. “And you thought I left because you weren’t worth staying for.”
His expression softened.
“Maybe we were both wrong.”
His fingers held mine, but he didn’t look away.
“I don’t know what tomorrow looks like,” I rushed on. “And honestly, I’m still processing half of what you’ve told me.”
