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Baryn catches me staring at him and raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That was absolutely not nothing.”

I reach for his hand. “I was thinking about how much I disliked you.”

His mouth curves. “You were obsessed with me.”

“That is not supported by the evidence.”

“You thought about me constantly.”

“Mostly negatively.”

“Still counts.” He laces his fingers through mine, runs his nose along my hairline. “How long until the concussion rules allow me to remind you how obsessed you are with me?”

A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. “That is an appalling thing to ask someone recovering from a head injury.”

“So not tonight.”

“Probably not.”

“Tomorrow?”

I consider him.

There are too many variables to know what happens from here. I'll go home soon, assuming my mother can be convinced that a concussion does not require thirty consecutive days of maternal supervision. Baryn will eventually have to go home too. We haven't talked about what happens when there is nothing left to keep us in the same place, or whether whatever this is was ever supposed to extend beyond Stillwater.

But Baryn is here. His hand is in mine. Tomorrow is beginning to sound promising.

“Ask me again in the morning.”

His grin tells me he intends to.

For once, I hope he's persistent.

EPILOGUE

SERENA

One year later…

There are approximately seventeen books on the floor of my office that do not belong to me, an array of charging cables belonging to devices I cannot identify, and a suspicious collection of audio equipment arranged across the desk beneath the window. The equipment has been there since moving in. Baryn continues to insist that its presence is temporary—a claim that has become increasingly difficult to substantiate given the acoustic panels he's recently mounted to the walls.

Technically, the office belongs to both of us, although I maintain that agreeing to share a mortgage does not constitute permission to establish a recording studio beside my collection of articulated skeletons.

I stand in the doorway surveying the latest additions to his side of the room when something cold presses against my calf. Faun looks up at me with his tail wagging so enthusiastically that the rest of his little body has also decided to participate.

“Your father is a terrible influence,” I inform him, scratching behind one ear as his tail wags enthusiastically beneath my attention. “I suppose I bear some responsibility for allowing you to become this spoiled.”

“He's not spoiled. He's loved,” Baryn argues from behind me, slipping an arm around my waist before pressing a kiss to the side of my neck. “Besides, he's been emotionally neglected for almost thirty minutes because his parents were otherwise occupied with activities he isn't old enough to understand.”

I turn in his arms, taking in the familiar sandy hair, glasses, and offensively attractive face I somehow get to wake up beside every morning. “In his defense, thirty minutes is a pretty long time when you have absolutely no idea what your parents are doing behind a closed door,” I point out, straightening the collar of his shirt.

His grin is immediate, and I feel the familiar pull of affection somewhere beneath my sternum. A year ago, I would have found the sensation alarming, but I've since developed a reasonable tolerance for being hopelessly in love with a man whose primary hobbies include investigating murders and antagonizing me.

Somewhere between solving a murder and knowing each other for approximately four months, Baryn and I somehow decided that living together was a perfectly reasonable next step. He started with a toothbrush, progressed to overtaking an alarming percentage of my closet, and eventually suggested that maintaining two separate houses was financially irresponsible, which was a particularly interesting argument coming from a man who owned a massive, fully paid-off mansion courtesy of his grandfather.