I have imagined this, too many times to count.
In the cell, on the concrete, staring at a ceiling that never changed, I built this moment out of memory, hope, and the sound of her voice on that recording. I pictured her running toward me, smiling, whole, and safe.
Reality doesn’t match any version I rehearsed.
Her hair is loose, not styled, just falling around her shoulders. She’s wearing yesterday’s clothes or someone else’s idea of what she should have put on this morning. There are shadows under her eyes deep enough that I can see them from here.
She looks… wrecked.
Not crying.
Not dramatic.
Just worn down to the edges.
Relief hits me first. The simple, overwhelming fact that Millie is here, breathing, real, not something my brain invented to survive another night.
Then confusion follows hard on its heels.
What happened?
My chest tightens, and it has nothing to do with the cell and everything to do with instinct.
Something is wrong.
Something I don’t understand yet.
Still, she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Not despite the exhaustion, but because of the truth of it. Because she is standing here in the middle of chaos that she didn’t choose, and still looks like something I would cross any line to reach.
The world narrows down to the distance between us.
Everything else fades.
Something in me stops, looks, and then commits to what comes next before my brain catches up to it.
I don’t slow down, I walk straight to her, covering the distance with a kind of certainty I don’t need to examine, and I pull her in before she has a chance to prepare for it. One arm wrapping around her waist and pulling her against me, my other hand cupping the back of her head, holding her there with everything I have.
She makes a small sound against my chest, something fractured and relieved at once. Her hands find my shirt with both fists, and she grabs it like she’s not going to let go, like she has decided somewhere in the last three days that letting go is no longer something she’s willing to do, and I feel that decision in every knuckle of her hands.
Her breath comes out in a long, shaking exhale.
Mine does too.
We stay like this for a moment that is longer than what’s considered brief and shorter than what I need, and then she tips her face up. I look down at her, and several things are happening on her face that she’s not bothering to hide from me, things that would normally take her several layers of composure to get through.
And the fact that she’s not doing any of that, the fact that she’s looking at me like this, openly and completely, does something to me that I am not going to be able to articulate for some time.
So I lean down and kiss her.
Right here, in the parking lot, with the full weight of Defiance standing twelve feet behind us. She kisses me back immediately, her fists tightening in my shirt, her whole body leaning into me like she’s been holding herself at a careful distance from the world for three days, and I am the first solid thing she’s been allowed to press against. The kiss is not brief or casual. It is the kind of kiss that says everything that three days of silence, one phone call, and a recording played in a concrete room could not completely contain.
When I pull back, I rest my forehead against hers, and her eyes stay closed for a breath before they open.
“I meant everything I said on that call,” I tell her, low enough that it belongs only to her.
She exhales softly, her face still tipped up toward mine, and it settles somewhere against my chest. “I know.” Her voice is rough at the edges, worn down from a handful of days she clearly did not spend sleeping. “I love you too,” she finally tells me in person.
