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Her light is on. I climb the stairs and knock before I can talk myself out of it.

She opens the door partway and stops. Hair down, mouth dropping open, like I’m the last person she expected to ever see at her door again.

"Aiden."

The marks I left on her throat are long gone. Two weeks of not looking at her, and the first thing I do is look for the claim I stamped when I believed she could actually be mine.

The wanting lands straight in my hands. Aching to tip her chin back and put my mouth on all that bare skin, put new marks where the old ones were, walk her backwards to that bed and stay there until neither of us can talk. Or the frame finally quits. I'm getting hard on her landing in the middle of the worst apology of my life.

I put my hands in my pockets and keep them there.

"I saw Whitmore at the office this morning."

Great start. I had ten hours to prepare, and I open with something that sounds an awful lot like an accusation.

"He offered me a job. I turned him down." She lifts her chin. "Just in case you’re wondering."

"Good."

It comes out too fast and too hard, and her face starts closing.

"Don’t worry, I'm still leaving at the end of the month. I gather Whitmore’s office is still too close for your liking. I’ll be far enough away that there’s no danger of us running into each other ever again."

Everything in me goes quiet and awful. That wasn’t what I meant at all. And somehow picturing this town without her in it is a hell of a lot harder than it should be.

"That's part of what I came about." It isn't. I came about all of it. "I read your papers. Friday night. Every page, twice."

She goes very still. The door drifts open another inch.

"I believe you. All of it. And I'm not going to stand on your landing reading them back to you, that's not what I came to say." Now that I'm finally saying it, it's coming out in the wrong order, like everything else I've said to her since I opened that drawer.

"I'm sorry. Not for being angry. You lied to me. But I’m sorry for deciding everything about you was a lie because one thing was. For barring you from the workshop like you were an intruder. For what happened in the office and walking out the way I did." I make myself hold her eyes for that last one. "That one I'll be sorry about for a long time."

She looks at me for what feels like a year. Her eyes are wet and her jaw is set and she doesn't move one inch toward me.

"Okay," she says.

That's all I get, and it's fair.

"I can't do this tonight, Aiden. You've had since Friday to think about it. I've had since you knocked." She pulls in a slow breath. "Take the night. Both of us. If you still mean it in the morning, you know where I work. For two more weeks, anyway."

I want to argue. Arguing is the thing I'm best at after fixing.

"Alright," I say instead.

I make it down the stairs and into the truck and drive home slowly with the windows down. It doesn't help.

She's right to make me wait. I know she's right.

I'm terrified it's already too late.

Chapter 20

Vanessa

I'm awake before the gulls this morning, which is not a regular occurrence. Aiden’s visit yesterday has left me fizzing.

Breakfast is a handful of slightly shriveled blueberries eaten standing over the sink. I finished the shredded cheese last night. I really need to go to the market, but Ellie’s never shy about asking probing questions and I’m not in the mind space for coming up with clever answers just yet. It's fine. Condemned women get a last meal. Hopeful ones, apparently, get antioxidants.