Page 79 of Thunder

I learned it over cold waffles in a diner. Broken isn't gone. It just takes time and somebody willing to make the first move.

Maybe this time the first move gets to be mine.

We lie there a while longer, not talking, his heartbeat slow and even under my cheek and his hand tracing lazy shapes on my shoulder.

Outside the window, somewhere off across the property a truck door slams and an engine turns over.

Ordinary ranch sounds, the world going on like it didn't just crack down the middle a few hours ago.

I think about my father driving those same roads right now, sitting with what he learned today, and I wait for the panic to come.

It doesn't.

There's just a tired, clean sort of ache where the terror used to live, the feeling of a wound finally open to the air instead of festering under a bandage nobody was allowed to lift.

It hurts.

But it's the kind of hurt that heals, and I'd take a hundred of those over one more day of the other kind.

"You went quiet," Thunder says.

"Good quiet." I press a kiss to his chest, right over the eagle. "Just thinking. I spent so long scared of this day. The day it all came out. And now it's here and it's the worst day I've had in months and I'm lying in your arms feeling almost peaceful, and I can't make the two things fit together."

"They fit fine." His hand stills on my shoulder. "What you were scared of was never the truth comin' out. It was bein' alone when it did." He tips my chin up. "You're not. That's worth noting, rattlesnake. Same storm. But this time you got somebody standin' in it with you."

"Raine'll be back tomorrow," he says, and I hear the smile come into his voice. "And she's gonna take one look at us not hidin' anymore and lose her entire mind. Probably start plannin' the wedding herself. Fair warning, she's already picked out where you're sittin' at her birthday."

"I'm sitting by her, obviously."

"Obviously." He kisses the top of my head. "You're already family to that kid, rattlesnake. Have been since you named the cat. Now the rest of the world just gets to know it too."

Family.

The word lands in the middle of my chest and takes root, because that's what this is now, isn't it.

Not a secret I'm keeping.

Not something I have to protect by living in the dark.

A cabin with a nine-year-old's horse posters down the hall, a man whose name I wear on my back, a life out here in the open where anybody can see it.

I got my sisters back over cold waffles.

I'll get my father back with time.

And I've got this, right here, this warm wrecked bed and this big steady man and a little girl who named me family before anybody else in this world would.

It's not a clean happy ending.

Nothing in this family ever is.

There's still a grave out past Big Spring we're all keeping quiet, still a shadow outfit somewhere past the good with a lens trained on the people we love, still a long road back with my father waiting to be walked.

But I'm not walking any of it alone anymore.

That's what I finally understand, lying here in the blue dark with his heart steady under my ear.

For a whole year I carried everything by myself, in the dark, terrified of what the light would do.