The words tug at something in my chest and almost make me smile.
“We’ll talk every day.”
He studies me for a long moment, and I know that look. His decision’s been made.
“Six months and I’m out,” he says. “I’m done. I don’t care what’s still going on. I’m getting on that yacht, and I’m coming to you.”
“Six months,” I say. “And I’ll have a place ready for our new life.”
He pushes to his feet and closes the distance between us before I can say anything else. His arms wrap around me, pulling me hard against his chest. I go willingly, burying my face against him as he holds me like he’s already counting the days until he can have me in his arms again.
He tightens his grip.
“I’m going to hate every second we’re apart.”
“I know,” I whisper. “Me too.”
For a moment, neither of us says anything. There’s no fight left, no argument still waiting to be won. Just acceptance. Just six months standing between the life we have now and the life we’re trying to build.
And somehow, that feels survivable.
Chapter 34
Dane Gallagher
My mum’shouse is still something I’m getting used to—the noise, the way everything overlaps, the feeling of stepping into a world that kept moving while I was gone.
The girls move through the rooms at full speed, talking over each other and leaving half-finished conversations in their wake. Isla and Zara orbit each other constantly, all restless energy with nowhere in particular to go.
Marcus is sitting in an armchair he’s clearly claimed as his, watching me with an attention that still puzzles me. It’s been months. At some point, the novelty of a man coming back from the dead should wear off.
Apparently, it hasn’t.
Zara still has that easy, childlike innocence. She wants to show me everything—songs on her phone, drawings she’s done, videos of dogs doing something ridiculous. I watch all of it. Every single thing.
I’m glad she’s still at an age where the world hasn’t complicated itself yet, where excitement comes easily, and happiness can be found in something as simple as a funny video. There’s something comforting about that. Something that makes this place feel a little more normal.
Isla I’m less sure about. She’s twelve—old enough to be online, old enough to know more than adults think she does—and she looks at me like she knows something she shouldn’t.
Could be normal.
Or it could be something else.
I don’t ask. I just let it be.
Mum moves through it all the way she always has—feeding people, directing traffic, keeping everything running without ever seeming to stop. It’s the kind of competence you don’t notice when you’ve always had it. I haven’t. Not like this.
And I’m about to ask her to turn some of that competence somewhere else.
I wait for a break in the rhythm. When it comes, I catch her eye.
“Can I grab you for a minute? Somewhere private?”
She reads my face straight away—whatever it is mothers pick up on—and nods, leading me down the hall to the back room she’s claimed as her private reading room. Books line the shelves, and a chair sits by the window. The noise of the house softens the moment the door closes.
She sits and looks at me, waiting.
“Charlotte and I are going to spend some time apart. With everything going on, my lawyer’s advised me not to leave Brisbane right now. So she will.”
