"I'm not caving."
"Riley."
"I'm not."
He looks down at me with that expression, the one that sits somewhere between patient and amused, and I feel the smile pulling at my mouth before I can stop it. "Maybe a small horse," I concede.
He laughs, low and warm. The sound of it moves through me the way it always does, settling something that didn't know it needed settling.
We sit quiet for a moment, the swing moving, the night spread out around us. I let myself think about what comes next withoutbracing against it the way I used to brace against anything that looked too much like a future.
Hadley starting school from this house in the fall. My work at the elementary school, and the kids I've already started to know. The community that has been folding itself around me with a warmth I didn't anticipate when I drove back here into River Bend planning to stay temporarily.
My mother, who has been saying I told you so with her eyes for three weeks without saying a single word out loud.
And Jace.
Jace, who built this house with rooms bigger than he needed for one person on purpose. Jace, who catches Hadley's hand without thinking about it. Jace, who told me he loved me in a quiet kitchen with nothing left to hide behind and meant every syllable of it.
"What are you thinking?" he asks.
I look out at the ranch, at the land that started all of this and is somehow also where it ends, where it begins, where it becomes whatever it's going to be.
"I'm thinking I couldn't be happier right now," I say.
His arm tightens around my shoulders.
"Yeah," he says quietly. "Me too."
The swing moves. The night holds us. The ranch sits patient and vast around the house he built.
And for the first time in five years I don't feel the pull toward the exit.
I feel the pull toward this.
Toward him and Hadley and the horse she's going to get whether I cave or not. Toward the McCallister women in the stands who called me his wife, and the brothers who show up before sunrise and the grandmother who says everything with her eyes.
Toward the life that assembled itself around me while I was busy being careful.
I pull the blanket tighter and lean into his side.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head.
Neither of us says anything else for a long time.
We don't need to.
We stay on that porch swing longer than we should.
The kind of longer that happens when everything has been running at full speed for weeks and suddenly it isn't. When the body doesn't know what to do with stillness because it forgot stillness was an option. The night air is cool, the blanket is warm and Jace is solid beside me in a way that makes me not want to move, ever.
Eventually the night gets late enough that I straighten off his shoulder and stand, holding out my hand.
He takes it.
We go inside and lock up, moving through the house in the easy rhythm that has become as natural as breathing. Somewhere between the front door and the hallway the energy between us shifts. We both know how we want this night to end. In each other's arms, warm and loving.
He stops me in the hallway, his hand finding my waist, turning me toward him in the unhurried way he has when he's ready and isn't in any rush to get past the getting there.
