He looks at me and waits.
“Whatever’s going on with you, you’re not alone. You know that.”
I see a flicker in his eyes, a glimpse of the kid who used to fall asleep with his hand fisted in my shirt, the one who trusted me to fix everything because I always did. Then it’s gone. The hardened version nods, drains his coffee, and sets the mug on the sideboard.
“Neither are you,” he says and walks out.
His boots fade down the hall. A door closes, and I sit in the half-dark with a cold screen and a cat on my lap, feeling the ache of a brother I can’t carry. Happiness and helplessness in the same breath. Jenna asleep and safe. Gabriel awake and unreachable. Both mine to hold.
I don't know how much time passes, but it’s enough for the coffee to go cold and the house to settle into its late-nightlanguage: the creak of old wood, the furnace kicking on, the wind under the mudroom door.
I go to the porch where the railing is splintered on the left side and the third board squeaks. The south pasture in the dark is nothing but shapes and stars. The air is warm for late spring, but the nights haven’t caught up yet. I can smell the hay barn and the horses, and underneath, the mineral-clean scent of the creek. My hands hang between my knees. I should go to bed, the one where Jenna is curled with a kitten and a pillow pulled against her chest because she holds things in her sleep.
The door opens behind me.
“Hey.” Her voice is sleep-rough and warm. It hits the base of my spine like it has since our first phone call.
She’s wearing one of my flannels, the green one, unbuttoned over a tank top, sleeves hanging past her hands. Her glasses are slightly askew, and her hair is pressed flat on one side. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Hey.”
Jenna sits beside me, her knee against my thigh, her shoulder finding the space below mine as if the geometry of us was solved months ago and our bodies are executing the proof. She doesn’t ask what's wrong. She reads me the way she reads data, with a willingness to sit with incomplete information until the pattern resolves.
I put my arm around her. She fits perfectly from my temple to my collarbone, her hand on my chest, palm flat over my sternum. The patches on her forearm are calm tonight, a pale pink instead of angry red. Her body responds to safety the waymine responds to her: without permission, without logic, all the way down.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
“Working.”
“Liar.” She says it without heat. “You were sitting in the dark with Pixel on your lap, staring at your security dashboard, running scenarios.”
“That’s working.”
“That’s worrying.” Her fingers curl into my shirt. “Different verb.”
I press my mouth to her hair. She smells like the soap I put in the bathroom, and underneath, the calendula from Kitty’s jar.
Three days. She’s been here three days. The rational part of me, the ordnance specialist, the man who calculates blast radii and acceptable risk, says wait. Three days is nothing.
But I know. I know the way I know fence lines, weather, and which calf is going to give trouble at the gate.
Jenna presses against my side, her hand on my chest. She’s here, in the dark, on my porch, because she chose to walk out of that house and sit beside me instead of sleep.
It’s real. Better than I imagined. And I’m done pretending that wanting something for myself is the same as taking it from someone else.
My left hand is still around her shoulders, but my right, the one hanging beside the step, is working a piece of wire from the railing. Baling wire, thin gauge, the kind we use for fence patches. My fingers are bending and shaping it without thinking.Twist, loop, twist again. The muscle memory of a man who can strip a detonator in the dark and rewire a circuit board by feel, whose fingers have always known things before his brain does.
I’m making a ring.
The realization lands like a boot to the chest. I’m sitting on a porch in the dark with the woman I love tucked against me, and my hands are making a ring from scrap wire because my body has decided something my mouth hasn’t said yet.
“Jenna.”
She tilts her face upward, and the moonlight glints off her glasses, revealing the dark, patient eyes behind them. No longer on guard, she gazes at me as if I’m the answer to a question she’s no longer afraid to ask.
“I need to tell you something.”
She waits like she always has. Since January, since the emails, since the calls that ran past midnight because neither of us wanted to hang up.
