Page 11

Just breathe.

The two of us in the hallway of our apartment in Colorado in the middle of the night, with our daughter asleep behind a door that is open just a crack. Everything that came before this, two years of war and grief, choosing wrong and finally, finally choosing right, settled somewhere behind us where it’s supposed to be.

Not gone. It doesn't go. But behind us.

“The coffee,” she says, after a while. Into my chest.

“Don't,” I warn.

“Xaden.”

“What happens in the nursery stays in the nursery.”

“You have been making it wrong on purpose.”

“I like it strong.”

“Nobody likes it that strong. Cas put his mug down and left the room.”

“Cas is a pussy.”

She pulls back enough to look at me and there are still tears on her face but she is fighting a smile and losing. The sight of it does what it always does, which is make me want to keep doing whatever caused it indefinitely.

“I love you,” she says. “I have loved you for an unreasonable length of time given how appalling you were to me.”

“I know,” I say through gritted teeth.

“You have a lot of making up to do, Devlin.”

“I know.”

“And you still let me believe you didn’t love me⁠—”

“Tink.” I put my thumb under her jaw and tilt her face up again. “I know. I'm sorry. I'm saying it now. I told you before in that coffee shop that I was giving you my heart and not to break it, that was me letting you in—well, I was trying to.”

She looks at me for a long moment.

“Loving you is the easiest and hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” she says.

I kiss her.

Not quickly. Not strategically. The way I kiss her when I’m telling her those three words she longed to hear without being able to say them. I pour it all into this kiss.

When I pull back she rests her forehead against my jaw, her hand flat against my chest, and we stand there in the hallway in the dark and breathe.

“Come back to bed,” she says finally.

“In a minute.”

She knows what the minute is. She has learned all my minutes by now, which ones are fine and which ones she should come back for and which ones she should leave alone. She lifts her head, looks at me, reaches up and touches my face, just once, brief and deliberate, and then she pads back down the hallway toward our room.

I turn back to the nursery door.

I stand there with my hand on the frame and the strip of light under the door. The silence from inside that is still, after two months, the best sound I have encountered. The sound of her sleeping. The sound of nothing being wrong.

Em, I think. Miles. Neave.

We're going to be alright.