Page 633 of End Game

Then trusted me with something I don't think he has given anyone else.

Tomorrow I will probably wake up bruised enough to curse him when I put on pants.

I'll still miss my mother.

I close my eyes.

Ronan's hand keeps tracing the same path over my arm until I stop noticing where one pass ends and the next begins.

For the first time since I walked out of my parents' house, happiness doesn't feel like evidence that the grief is getting smaller.

It just feels like something else I still get to have.

Chapter forty-six

Downtime Activities

Cameron

There are five adults in this house, which means at any given moment at least three of us are working, one of us is eating something that belongs to somebody else, and Dex is probably making too much noise.

Today, impressively, all three things are happening at once.

“I am not changing it back,” Dex says from the dining room.

I look up from my laptop.

He's wearing headphones around his neck instead of over his ears, one knee bouncing under the table while four different audio tracks cover his screen. His guitar is propped against the chair beside him, and there is a half-eaten sandwich approximately two inches from his keyboard despite Micah having informed him twice that this is how electronics die.

“You changed the fucking bridge,” a voice says through his laptop speakers.

Austin.

Again.

Dex points at the screen like Austin can somehow feel the accusation through several hundred miles of internet. “I improved the bridge.”

“You added another vocal layer.”

“Because it needed one.”

“It already had six.”

“And now it has seven. You're welcome.”

I grin and go back to the fourth revision of website copy for a client who is paying me enough money that I am morally obligated not to complain about the number of revisions.

I complain anyway—not to them.

I'm a professional.

Mostly.

My newest client is a regional home-services company rolling out a new brand across nine locations, which sounded completely reasonable when I first came across the request.

Landing pages.

Email sequences.