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“You came back,” he mumbled into my neck.
“Of course, I did,” I whispered, smoothing a hand down his back. “Did you miss me?”
He nodded so hard his forehead bumped my chin.
I smiled and looked around the room—at the soft chaos, the unspoken healing that happened here in cracked voices and glitter glue. These kids didn’t care what kind of shoes you wore or what car you drove. They didn’t care if you were sleeping with someone who’d lived through war.
They just wanted to know you’d come back. That you stayed. That you showed up even when you were breaking inside.
I sat down on the carpet with Zeke still in my lap and helped Delilah sound out a tricky word. Josie slid in next to us a moment later, handing me a juice box like it was a peace offering.
“They missed you,” she said quietly.
I looked up at her. “I missed them more.”
We sat like that a while, surrounded by the soft hum of kid-noise. And I let myself really feel it—the steadiness of this room, the simple mercy of showing up when you don’t know how to heal.
“I used to think,” I said after a while, “that violent men were all the same. Bad. Broken. Too far gone.”
Josie glanced at me sideways. “And now?”
I looked down at Zeke, his lashes fluttering as he nodded off in my lap.
“Now I know there are men who use violence to protect,” I said. “Men who’ve seen too much and still choose softness when it matters. I didn’t think someone like Noah could exist.”
“And you trust him?” she asked.
I was quiet for a second. Then nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
Even if it scared me. Even if it complicated every plan I’d ever made.
Even the ones that still lived in the back of my head—like the old dream of a cottage on Isle of Palms. A place near the beach with a little garden out back. A spot where I could grade papers on the porch and fall asleep to the sound of the sea brushing up against a world too loud to listen.
Maybe that dream still had room for me.
Maybe it had room for him, too.
Josie nudged me again. “You’re thinking about the beach house, aren’t you?”
I snorted, embarrassed. “Maybe.”
She smiled. “You know ... he could probably buy one tomorrow.”
“I don’t want him to buy it for me,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. “I want to build it. Earn it. I just ... I want it to be ours.”
She reached out and squeezed my hand. “Then it will be.”
In that moment—with the weight of a child’s body heavy in my lap, the smell of crayons and peanut butter in the air, and the soft hum of a world still turning—I believed her.
Even if everything was still a mess, I believed that my future with Noah Dane was bright.
22
NOAH
Ileaned against the railing of our boat, the Folly Island Channel stretching dark and glassy under a bruised dusk sky.