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“We were planning to leave after graduation. He had this whole dream—New York, football, a tiny apartment with a fire escape even though he could afford something bigger.”

A beat. Then her mouth curves, but it’s not a smile. It’s a scar in disguise.

“He died in a car accident two weeks before prom. A drunk driver ran a red light. His mom called me before the cops did.”

Her hand curls in the blanket like she’s trying to anchor herself to something solid.

“I don’t talk about him,” she adds, voice hollow now. “I couldn’t. Not even in therapy. I locked it all away. Packed it up like a box I shoved into the back of a closet and pretended didn’t exist.”

She turns back to me, eyes glassy but unwavering. “And then I slipped into a coma… and woke up in a life where he didn’t die.”

The air leaves my lungs like a punch to the gut. But I stay quiet.

Because this is sacred ground.

“I was living with him in a penthouse in Manhattan. Pregnant. Happy. It felt so real, Fletch. I could feel the babies kicking. I could smell him on my clothes. Hear his guitar through the walls. And you weren’t there.”

She looks down, and the breath she takes is jagged. “You didn’t exist. At least not in the way you do now.”

My throat tightens. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. “Time didn’t move right. But it felt like years.”

I press a fist to my sternum, trying to ease the ache blooming there like wildfire.

“And when I woke up… it broke me. Because I loved him. And I lost him again.”

She bites down hard on her bottom lip. “That’s why I named the baby Kingston. Not because I wish it was real. But because it was. In there. And now it’s gone.”

A beat of silence swells between us. And then⁠—

“But I came back to you,” she adds, voice breaking. “When everything started to unravel in the dream, it wasn’t him I saw. It was you.”

My eyes sting. I don’t look away.

“You were the tether. The voice that kept calling me home.”

I reach for her hand. Hold it like it’s glass and wildfire all at once.

“I’m not angry,” I say, barely more than a breath. “How could I be? He was your first love. That kind of grief doesn’t come with an expiration date.”

Her fingers tighten around mine.

“But I’m here now,” I tell her. “And so are they. Our sons. Your past doesn’t scare me, Mya. Not if you’re willing to let me be part of what comes next.”

Her eyes brim over.

Not with sadness this time.

With something softer. Lighter. The kind of ache that might someday become peace.

“I want that,” she says, voice cracking. “I want to stop living in ghosts.”

I lift her hand to my mouth. Kiss her knuckles. One by one.

“Then we start here,” I whisper. “With Kingston. With Kody. With us.”

And in the quiet that follows, she lets out a breath she’s been holding since she was seventeen.