"Yes," I say. Then, because he deserves the honest version, "No. Maybe somewhere in between."
He doesn't try to fix it. Doesn't offer reassurance or reframe it or tell me I should feel differently than I do. He just stands there holding my hands and letting me have the moment without making it smaller than it is, which is exactly right and exactly him.
"I was so scared," I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I intend it to, stripped of the composure I've been holding in place since four seventeen this morning when he walked out the door. "Not just tonight. All of it. Every time something escalated I told myself I was handling it and I was, I did, but underneath that I was not."
"I know," he says.
"I should have said that sooner."
"You said it when you could," he answers. "That's enough."
I look up at him, at the exhaustion sitting around his eyes and the steadiness underneath it that doesn't waver regardless ofwhat the night asked of him. I feel the thing I've been feeling for weeks move through me without obstruction for the first time. Tears try to escape and he sees it.
I think it's just the relief that it's over. He notices and pulls me closer. Of course that always makes the tears flow harder because I see it clearly now.
Love, clean and uncomplicated.
Without the fear underneath it.
Just love.
"I need you to know something," I tell him.
He waits.
"I'm not scared anymore," I say. "Of this. Of us. Of what it means to let this be real." I hold his gaze steady. "I'm done being scared of the best thing that's happened to me."
He's quiet for a moment.
Then he brings my hands up and presses his mouth to my knuckles, simple and unhurried.
"Good," he says.
That's all.
Just good.
It's enough.
My mother brings Hadley back at eight.
I hear the car on the drive and Hadley's voice before the door opens, already talking at full volume about something that happened at her grandmother's. It apparently involved a cat, a sprinkler, and a sequence of events my mother looks like she's still recovering from.
Hadley hits the kitchen at full speed and wraps around my legs and I pick her up and hold her in the way I've been holding her since she was an infant.
Tight and certain, my face in her hair, breathing in the specific smell of her that has been the most grounding thing in my life for five years.
"You okay, Mom?" she asks, pulling back to look at me with those eyes that see too much.
"Better than okay," I tell her.
She studies me for a second with the serious evaluating look she gets when she's deciding whether to believe something, thenapparently decides I'm telling the truth and turns her attention to Jace.
Reaching for him with the easy confidence of a child who has never once been turned away by him and doesn't expect to start now.
He takes her without hesitation.
My mother catches my eye over Hadley's head and holds it for a moment. In that moment she does the thing she's been doing my whole life, communicating paragraphs with her eyes without saying a single word out loud.
