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Her mother splutters as her father protests. Bernard gapes like he just got slapped.
Jen ignores them all. She faces me and extends a hand. “Fallon, take my hand and take me home.”
This woman. My heart cracks right there in my chest, and I cross the distance between us. In a familiar movement, my arm slides around her shoulder, and everything feels right again. We walk far enough that the trees hide us from our audience and Jen pauses, wrapping both her arms around my middle. When she turns to snuggle into my chest, I let out a breath.
This is perfection. Having Jen in my arms makes something click inside me, like the last piece of a jigsaw slotting into place. With her head nestled under my chin, I pull her close and wrap my arms around her. We stand like that for a few long moments, inhaling each other, letting the tension of the last couple of hours seep out of our bodies.
Then Jen pulls away and frowns at me. “You left.”
I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry.”
She bunches her lips to the side. “I suppose you did come back. And you sort of saved me from my creepy, stalker ex-boss. And you’ve been kind of amazing for the past month.” She glances at the sky. “And did those crows sense something was wrong? I’ve never seen them react like that.”
“Maybe they’re loyal because we fed them for a month.”
Jen’s brows tug together. “I’ll have to look up if that’s even possible. But if it is, then I should definitely be thanking you.”
My lips twitch. “So the crows tip the scales in my favor?” I can just imagine the pros and cons list Jen is making in her mind, trying to figure out if she’s happy I’m here or not.
She slides her gaze back to mine. “Only if you promise to stay the night.”
“That, I can do,” I answer. “Plus, I brought you something. I left it by the guesthouse door.”
She straightens, dropping her arms from my waist. “You did?”
I can’t resist catching her hand in mine as we turn down the familiar beaten dirt path. “I did.”
We walk in silence until the guesthouse comes into view, then I pull away from her to grab the basket. I present it to her and watch as she pulls away the tea towel I laid over the contents.
Tilting her head, Jen picks up one of the croissants in the basket and inspects it. Her eyes flick to mine. “Croissants?”
“I felt the need to redeem myself.”
Her eyes glimmer as her lips curl. “You made these?” Jen’s smile widens. “You learned how to make croissants for me,” she says, almost to herself. Then she gets that focused look on her face as she rips the baked good open. “Good layers,” she says, inspecting. “Crisp on the outside, tender inside.” She pops a piece in her mouth and chews, nodding. “You used good butter.”
My lips twitch. “I did.”
“It’s good, Fallon,” she says, finally lifting her eyes to mine. “Really good.”
“Spent all week trying to get them right. My mom and sister think I’m crazy.”
Jen’s smile is like the first ray of sunlight after a never-ending storm. She places the pieces of her croissant back in the basket, then straightens and reaches for the door. “I spent all week thinking of you too,” she announces.
On the other side of the door, I find the guesthouse scattered with books. Each of them has color-coded tags throughout, dozens per tome. There’s a thick notebook and pen on the nightstand. Jen makes a beeline for the journal, flipping it open to read the first page.
My eyes land on the title of the nearest book: Psychology of a Prisoner. Heart thundering, I grab it and flip it over to read the back, then open one of the tabs Jen must have put in it. It lands on a page that details the difficulty of starting your life over after a prison term.
Throat tight, I realize what Jen’s been doing. She hasn’t been judging me for my past; she’s been trying to understand it. She never turned her back on me when she learned I’d been to prison. In Jen’s typical rational way, she just set to work untangling the complicated strands of my past in a way that made sense to her.
Emotion clogs my throat. How could I ever think that she would look at me differently after learning about my incarceration? My past could never stand between us. When she asked me about my conviction, her reaction was one of shock, but not judgment. I thought she was pushing me away, but she was just trying to figure out how this puzzle piece fit into the whole.
“So,” Jen says, consulting her notes, “I’ve read a dozen books so far, but I think it would help if I understood the intricacies of your case. Three years seems pretty short for robbery with a deadly weapon, based on everything I’ve read about Nevada law. My best guess, without going through your case notes, is that you pled guilty, but you weren’t directly involved. You were so young, you know? Facing that kind of prison time must have been terrifying.” She clicks her tongue, still scanning her notes.
My heart warms, lips unable to stop twitching. “You’ve been reading about Nevada law?”
Jen frowns, eyes still on the notebook. “Yeah. I’m trying to figure out your headspace so I can convince you to stay here and be with me. But I need to understand what you’ve been through, at least on some level. My next step was to try to find the details of your case to confirm my hypothesis about the guilty plea and the light sentence, but I figured I’d ask you first since that seemed kind of…invasive.” She bites her lip, flipping to a new page to scan her neat handwriting. “Hold on, I know I wrote something about long-term effects of incarceration. I had a whole plan for how we would talk about this.”
I. Fucking. Love. Her.
