A night bird calls from the ravine behind the subdivision. The same ravine where I caught her during the mudslide. The same ravine where the lightning split a tree and I held it over my head and understood for the first time that strength means nothing if there's no one standing behind you worth protecting.
Junia's hand pauses on the fourth rune. The knot-mark. The one that means belonging.
"Flynn."
"Mm."
"I want to ask you something."
She changed. The post-combat softness is still there, but underneath it, something sharper. Nervous. The same tone she used when she quoted the obscure bylaws at Valerius, like she'd rehearsed the words a hundred times and still wasn't sure they'd come out right.
I open my eyes. The stars stare back, indifferent and beautiful.
"Ask."
She props herself up on one elbow. The tarp crinkles. Her hair falls across my body and the rooted wildflower bobs near her ear like a tiny purple flag of surrender. In the faint starlight, her eyes are enormous and dark and terrified in a way they weren't when stone gargoyles loomed over her or magical beetles swarmed from the sky.
"What if we built something. Together. On the property division."
"There is no property line."
"On where it was. Right there. Where the fence was."
My pulse picks up under her palm. She has to feel it.
"Built what."
She bites her lower lip. Her finger resumes tracing the knot-mark, faster now, circling the loops like she's working up courage from the pattern.
"A greenhouse. A real one. Steel frame, tempered glass, reinforced foundation. Not some flimsy hobby shed. Something fortified. Something that could survive beetles and golems and magical thunderstorms and vindictive elf HOA presidents." Her words accelerate, tumbling over each other. "Something with your structural precision and my growing magic and a drainage system you'd design because you'd lose your mind if I just winged it, and raised beds at regulation height with wild plantings in between, and a door that locks from the inside so no one can touch what we build."
She stops.
Breathes.
"Together."
The cricket chorus swells in the silence. My heart hammers against her fingertip on the knot-mark. The rune that means belonging.
"You're asking me to pour a shared foundation."
"I'm asking you to pour a shared foundation."
I stare up at the sky. Forty-seven stars visible where the fence used to block the view.
Forty-seven.
I always count.
CHAPTER 19
JUNIA
TWO YEARS LATER
The toddler rips the mailbox out of the ground.
Not the post. The entire concrete footing. Eighteen inches of cured Portland mix dangling from the bottom like a gray root ball, crumbling onto the pristine sidewalk that Flynn re-poured himself last September with a laser level and a disturbing amount of joy.
