And I adored the work.
And I adored the future I was building.
I just didn’t know how to live inside all of it without hollowing something out.
Maybe myself.
Chapter
Eighteen
RACHEL
Iwas in the middle of psyching myself up to enthusiasm when the doorbell rang.
Not the polite, distant buzz of the downstairs door asking for admission to the building. No—this was the ringer on my actual apartment door.
Which meant someone was alreadyhere.
My first thought was Alix. Maybe she was bringing up coffee. Or bread. Or some kind of emotional support carbohydrate. The drinks the night before had helped more than I wanted to admit. I felt almost… human again.
I really couldn’t ask for more.
I stared at the door for a second too long, my brain doing that slow, panicked inventory of what I was wearing (old sweater, leggings, socks that did not match), what the apartment looked like (better than yesterday, worse than my fantasies), and whether I had, in fact, hallucinated the last forty-eight hours.
The doorbell rang again.
Insistent this time.
I glanced at the clock. Too early for deliveries. Too early for anything I’d planned.
I opened the door anyway.
Dominic stood there like a beautiful error in my schedule.
Coat still on, rain-speckled and darkened at the shoulders, hair slightly wind-tousled, eyes bright in that way that meant he was genuinely happy to see me and not even pretending otherwise. There was a faint chill clinging to him, the kind that came from standing outside too long in wet air. He held a small bouquet in one hand—nothing extravagant, just wildflowers and greenery wrapped in brown paper—and the second our eyes met, his face lit up.
“Surprise,” he said.
I didn’t get a chance to answer.
He stepped forward, dropped the flowers somewhere behind me without even looking, and kissed me like he’d been counting the seconds. Not gentle. Not rushed. Just inevitable. His hands framed my face, cool at first from the cold, then quickly warming, solid and devastatingly familiar, and I made a sound that was embarrassingly close to a whimper before I even realized I was making it.
It felt like being anchored.
“Hi,” I managed when he finally pulled back, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with the stairs.
“Hi,” he said, smiling like he’d just won something.
I stared at him. Really stared. The plane hadn’t changed him. The train hadn’t erased him. The distance hadn’t blurred him. He was still Dominic—real and ridiculous and standing in my doorway like he’d always been part of the architecture.
“You were supposed to be here in a couple of hours,” I said, my voice weak with disbelief and something dangerously close to relief.
He shrugged one shoulder, unapologetic. “I got impatient.” Another smile flash-fired over his face. “I found an earlier train. I wanted to surprise you.”
My brain stalled somewhere betweenthat’s adorableandI am not emotionally dressed for this.
“You’re wet,” I said, because focusing on literally anything was better than thinking about how good it felt to have him here.
