I rolled us to the side, holding her close. She curled into me, her head on my shoulder, her fingers tracing idle patterns on my biceps.
Neither of us wanted to break the magic spell we’d fallen under. There wasn’t anything to say. Not yet. The quiet between us wasn’t awkward. It was comfortable but charged. Like the air after a storm, when everything’s been washed clean and the world feels new.
I pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
She tilted her face up to mine, her eyes soft in the dim light. “That was?—”
“Yeah.”
She smiled. A real one. Not the careful, professional kind she gave everyone else. This was just for me.
I kissed her again, slow and deep, my hand cupping the back of her neck. She melted into it, her body relaxing against mine.
We had time.
For the first time in years, I had time.
Later, she was lying with her head on my shoulder and one of her legs across mine and her hand flat against the center of my chest the way it had been on the ridge, except this time her own pulse and mine had finally synced.
"I have a question," she said. Her voice was sleep soft.
"Yeah."
"How long have you been leaving the granola bar and the water on my step."
The question caught me sideways. I hadn't known she knew.
"Since the second week."
"Why."
"Because you were getting up at five thirty to photograph my horses and not eating breakfast, and I wasn't going to ask you to take care of yourself because you would have hated that."
She didn't answer for a long moment.
"My grandfather did that," she said finally. "For my grandmother. He'd put crackers and a glass of water on her bedside table every night for forty years because she got nauseous in the mornings and he never wanted her to have to ask."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah." She breathed out, slow. I felt her go heavier against my shoulder. Sleep was coming for her. Sleep was coming for me too, but I needed to get back to my own bed before it found me.
Tomorrow was Father's Day and Rory was going to wake up with hope that didn't deserve to be hoped and Dana was going to do whatever Dana was going to do, and I had a daughter to walk through that and a woman in my arms who had just been told something I had never told anyone, and I was not in a position to do any of it well.
I'd been doing it badly because I'd been doing it alone. I was going to do it differently in the morning.
"Bella."
"Mm."
"Tomorrow's going to be hard."
"I know."
"I want you with me."
She turned her face into my shoulder. Her arm tightened across my chest. She didn't say okay this time. She just stayed exactly where she was, and that was its own kind of answer.
I let her fall asleep, watching her longer than I should have. Then I let myself out, so I'd be back at the house before my daughter arrived home.
