I peer over her shoulder at the creek, steady in the dark. “No.”
Her fingers tighten around mine as she rests her forehead against my temple.
“You read it when you miss him,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
I turn my face a fraction. “You read yours too?”
“Sometimes.” A pause. “When I need to hear his voice but cannot remember exactly what it sounded like anymore.”
Her thumb moves over my knuckles, tracing the scars that have faded over the years but never fully disappeared—a map of everything my hands have been through and what they have learnt since.
“You realize, he was proud long before Ava was born,” she states.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you? Because you became a good man before you believed you were one.”
Skylar shifts in my lap and I glance toward the house. At the back door, one tiny pink gumboot lies on its side, the other standing upright beside it, abandoned mid-stride—the way Ava abandons everything, with complete commitment and zero follow-through. She is going to be a nightmare at sixteen and I can already see it.
Skylar pulls back and looks at my face.
God, I love this woman.
Not only in the wild, starving way of seventeen, looking at her as if she hung every star by hand and then called him an asshole for staring.
Not only in the desperate way of twenty-five, when I came out of prison and found her changed and hurting, still mine in every way I had no right to claim and could not stop wanting anyway.
I love her now in the way a man loves life. Without the fear underneath it that used to come with everything good.
I love her in the coffee she leaves, too sweet for me because she says bitterness is not a personality. I love her in the way she still says my full name when she is furious and in the way she still curls into my side in sleep, as if my chest is the only pillow she has ever trusted with the unguarded version of herself.
I lean in and kiss the side of her neck.
She tilts her head and gives me more room, as she always has and always will, and thank fuck for that, because some things should never change and that is one of them.
“I love you, Sky.”
For a while, we sit here without talking.
Just the two of us on the back porch. The night settles around the house. Somewhere beyond the fence, a bird calls once, then falls quiet again.
It’s hard to believe that Rainer is gone but still here too.
He’s in the boards beneath us. In the workshop lights still burning out front. In the woman on my lap. He is in every second chance I did not earn but received anyway. Every tool on the wall and every stubborn lesson.
I never changed the workshop sign. I never will. It will always say Rainer’s Custom Restorations, crooked and faded and entirely his, because some things are not mine to change no matter whose name is on the paperwork.
He is in the way I stand beside the young kid who came by last winter looking for cash work and pretending he wasn’t hungry. It hurt to watch because I recognized every single part of that performance.
His name is Noah.
Sixteen. Too thin. Too angry. Mouthy as fuck, in the specific way of someone who learnt early that a sharp mouth was cheaper than armor and more immediately available.
I gave him a sandwich.
