I tilt my head enough to look at him. “Doing what.”
“Believing this might not be a disaster.”
I laugh softly. “That is an extremely Bron way to phrase hope.”
“It’s my brand.”
“No,” I murmur, settling closer despite myself. “I think your brand is changing.”
He goes quiet at that. Then: “Do you believe it?”
I know what he means, and because the night has already demanded honesty from me, I give it. “Yes,” I say. “I think I do.”
His hand stills in my hair for half a beat before resuming. “That’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“You’ve had a very strange life.”
“I’ve had a badly managed life.”
That should make me laugh. Instead it makes me ache in a soft place I have been protecting for years. “Bron.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not promising a neat ending.”
“I know.”
“I’m not promising we can fix all of this quickly.”
“I know.”
“I’m not even promising we won’t scare the hell out of each other again.”
That finally does make him smile under my cheek; I can feel it move through his chest before I see it. “Tilda, sweetheart, I would distrust any future with us in it that wasn’t at least a little terrifying.”
I lift my head and give him a look.
He amends, “In a healthy, growth-oriented way.”
“That is somehow worse.”
He grins then, really grins, and the warmth of it in the dark feels like a door opening somewhere inside me.
I rest my hand over his heart and think about Jesse with his solemn eyes and careful offerings, about suspicious ducks and fossil rocks and the terrible, tender possibility of a family reshaping itself in real time. We are not finished becoming. We are not healed into something simple. There are still dangers ahead, inside and outside this competition, and I know better than to treat hope like a guarantee. But lying here with Bron’s arm around me and his breathing evening into sleep, I understand that reconciliation no longer feels like a fantasy built out of nostalgia and chemistry.
It feels possible.
And that, more than anything else, is what finally lets me close my eyes.
CHAPTER 26
BRON
The first thing I understand when I wake is that peace has a different weight when you’ve earned even a little of it.
For most of my adult life, mornings have tended to arrive like debt collectors—loud, unwelcome, and carrying itemized proof of previous bad judgment. Hangovers. Missed calls. Empty bottles. Regret wearing cologne. Even the better mornings, the triumphant ones, usually came with some stale aftertaste of performance. I’d wake up after a show or a win or a night spent being exactly the man people expected me to be, and there would always be this restless animal pacing somewhere under my ribs, already hungry for the next thing, already bored with whatever I’d just survived.
This morning feels different.
