"I want to say something," he says.
"Okay," I answer.
"I know we said things last night. Things that mattered." He holds my gaze steady. "But I want to say it again when it's not the middle of a crisis. When it's just this." He gestures at the kitchen, the house, the space between us. "Just us."
My chest tightens.
"I love you, Riley." His voice is low and even. The way it gets when he means something all the way down.
"Not because of Hadley, not because of what we've been through, not because the timing lined up. I love you because of who you are. The way you stood at that rail tonight. The way you said we and meant it. The way you stayed when every smart instinct you had was telling you to go."
I cross the kitchen to him.
Not slowly, not with hesitation, not with any of the careful measured steps I've been taking toward him for weeks. Just directly, the way you move toward something when you're done pretending you don't want to be there.
I stop in front of him and look up at his eyes. What I find on his face makes everything I've been holding for the past five years feel like it was just waiting for somewhere safe to land.
"I love you," I tell him. "I think I have for longer than I'm ready to admit out loud."
He reaches up and tucks my hair back, his hand settling against my jaw.
"You don't have to admit anything," he says. "You just have to be with me."
"I'll be here," I tell him.
His forehead drops to mine.
"Good," he says quietly. "Because I built the closet big enough for two."
I laugh, soft and real, and he pulls me in, and the night settles around us like something that was always going to end up here.
Like it was never going to go any other way.
We end up on the porch swing.
I'm not sure whose idea it is. Just one of those things that happens when two people are moving through a space together and arrive somewhere together without planning to. He brings a blanket. I pull my knees up and he sits close enough that I feel the heat coming from him with his arm along my shoulders. The swing moves in that easy back and forth way that doesn't require any effort to maintain.
The ranch spreads out in front of us in the dark.
It's something, this view. I've looked at it enough times now that it's become familiar, but familiar hasn't made it smaller. The pasture running long toward the tree line, the main ranch house lights visible in the distance, the Miller land sitting quiet to the east where the house Jace built stands solid against the sky.
His house.
Our house, a voice in the back of my head says, and I don't argue with it the way I would have two months ago.
"Hadley wants a horse," I say.
Jace doesn't miss a beat. "I know. She told me three times this week."
"She's five."
"Wyatt got his first horse at six," he says. "Brooks didn't trust it but he got through it."
I smile at that, at the easy way he references his family, the way the McCallister's exist in his conversation like weather. Always present in his thoughts, entirely natural.
"Hadley is being relentless about it."
"She's already relentless about it," he says. "I'm just waiting on you to cave."
