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She stood up from the couch abruptly and she turned around to look down at her sisters. And immediately, she was hit by a love for them that was so intense that she almost started crying for different reasons.

There was Flannery with her red braids, in her own set of floral summer pajamas, hers with tulips everywhere.

Indy was wearing her lupine jammies, her strawberry-blonde hair flowing everywhere, looking as if she’d brushed it with only her fingers, which she probably had.

Kitty saw more than just the younger sisters that she’d always felt responsible for. She saw who they were now, what they’d built, and how they showed up for each other. She saw the way they looked at her and understood—in a different way, now—that while they might not have had the parents they wanted, they’d always had this. Each other.

And maybe it was time that she started thinking about how she could build her life on that, instead.

Because she refused to accept that her foundation had to stay cracked.

She refused to believe they had to pay for sins that had never been theirs.

“I love you both so much,” she said, and she wasn’t surprised that they looked startled, because they’d never been demonstrative. Not like that. And this wasn’t the time, but she was pretty sure that she wasn’t the only one wandering around with their parents a little too loud inside their head.

She didn’t intend to let that go on either. Not anymore.

“Good,” Indy was saying, with a crooked little smile. “You should love us.”

“We love you too,” Flannery replied, shaking her head at Indy.

“And I appreciate this exorcism more than you could possibly know,” Kitty told them. “It was long overdue and clearly desperately needed. But…”

Indy and Flannery exchanged one of those looks again.

“But,” Flannery echoed with a smile, and glanced toward the ceiling again.

“Go,” Indy said. “In case it isn’t obvious, we’re on Team Finn in this. We like him. More importantly, you do too.”

Kitty was afraid that if she spoke on that, she would break down into tears again or start ranting incoherently or maybe simply melt into a puddle of all the giant emotions inside of her, right here on the den floor.

So all she did was nod, maybe a little jerkily. Then she whirled around and headed upstairs. She meant to walk calmly up to her room, but as she climbed the stairs she found herself moving faster and faster. Until she was actually running when she reached the attic landing.

And she threw herself into the bedroom at the top, expecting that she would wake Finn up.

But he was exactly where he always was. Lying in their bed with a book in his hands and the moment she appeared, that shattering blue gaze on hers.

“You’ve been crying,” he said, and for the first time, she saw him frown.

It made her heart stutter.

“Here’s the thing,” Kitty said as boldly as she could while she was standing in the doorway in daffodil pajamas, her eyes swollen red. But there was a kind of bright, demanding need to tell this man the truth that was burning up inside of her. “I don’t think that I would have asked just any man to marry me. I could have run into every other single man in Cowboy Point, and it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to ask them anything. It was you, Finn. It matters that it was you.”

Finn set his book aside without shifting his gaze from hers. But he didn’t say a word.

And yet she could feel that intensity of his, humming inside of her, like he’d been a part of her all this time. How had she not noticed this?

She pushed on, because she wanted to say these things. She needed to say these things, right now, because she was afraid that all that concrete might creep back in if she wasn’t vigilant. If she wasn’t brave. “And I also think that if I’d married someone else, there would have been absolutely no sex involved. I would have bought a couch and shoved it in this room if necessary. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to share a bed with anyone. Not unless it was you.”

At that, he sat up, but he didn’t move from the bed. He didn’t do a single thing to make that gaze of his less intense. And she had the distinct impression that there could be any kind of commotion outside and he still would stay exactly like this, practically frozen into place, waiting for her to finish telling him whatever it was she was telling him.

Like he knew how important this was too.

So she made herself keep right on going.

“You bother me,” she told him, and she heard the way her voice hitched a bit on that word. “You bothered me from the start. At first I thought it was an itch, or something like that. Some physical awareness of something bad for me. I assumed it was just dislike. I told myself it was.” She tried to slow down, to breathe. “But I think, Finn, that the reason you bothered me pretty much since the first moment you set foot in Cowboy Point, is because…”

Kitty stalled out, not sure she could really do this.