“This isn’t like that, baby,” Talisha told him very gently. “You can talk to your mom later. I think she needs Anne right now.”
Still crying, face hidden, Sadie nodded her agreement.
“Hal?” Brooke was calling from outside. “I need to show you something, okay? Like, right now? This second? It’s out here, and it’s really important, so, uh, could you just come over here?”
“It’s called tact,” Claire hollered. “We’d like to introduce you.”
Hal looked between his wife and mother, then landed, finally, on Anne. “I can trust her with you?” he asked quietly. “You promise? You’ll take care of her? You’ll treat her right?” His tight expression held back years of pain.
“I promise,” Anne told him, with all the sincerity she felt. She held his gaze until he nodded, seemingly satisfied, and followed Talisha out onto the back deck.
With the door closed, Anne and Sadie finally had a bit of privacy. Well, as long as their families kept their backs to the dining room windows and doors—which, thankfully, they seemed to be doing.
Heart pounding in her throat, Anne finally found the strength to take the chair next to Sadie, scooting it as close as she could get.
Sadie hadn’t removed her hands from her face. Another observer might’ve read it as an attempt to hide, but Anne knew better. Just another kind of touch, that was all, one that soothed Sadie and connected her to herself.
“Sadie,” she said, pulling gently at Sadie’s wrists. “Honey. Please look at me. Just let me see your face. Come on.”
After a moment, Sadie relented. Her face was wet and creased with effort, and when she finally spoke, the words were crammed with tears.
“Youwhat?” Anne took Sadie’s hands in her own and squeezed. “Stared? I don’t understand.”
“Scared,” Sadie exclaimed, hiccuping through her halting confession. “I was. So scared. That you. Would never say it. Out loud. You haven’t. Not once. Not in. Four years.”
“Are you saying you didn’t know how I felt about you?” Guilt, sudden and terrible, twisted in Anne’s stomach. Oh God. She’d thought—assumed—she’d tried to show Sadie, even when the right words wouldn’t come—
“Oh, I knew.” Sadie was still crying. “Especially after this past week. The way you look at me, everything you’ve said to me. Wanting to commit to me for the rest of our lives. OfcourseI know you love me. But—” Another hiccup. “But it’s one thing to know it, and another thing to hear you say it out loud, when I wasn’t sure you ever would. I convinced myself it was all right. What mattered was how you made me feel and what you did, not what you said. That you just weren’t the kind of person who put your feelings into words. That it wasn’t anything like—him, hiding from me. Because you told me you were done hiding, and I trust you, Ido. Then—this.” Her wet face was bright with awe and joy. “And—oh, Anne, it was in front of our families, too. Like you wanted everyone to know exactly how you feel.”
Finally, it clicked. Even though Anne believed that actions mattered most, she was in love with a woman who’d been eviscerated by her ex-husband’s words.
Sadie, a poet, needed words to heal.
Language fails. Speak anyway.
“Before this past week, I didn’t think I needed to say it out loud,” Anne began, and then, “No. That isn’t true. I couldn’t let myself say it. Because I knew on some level that it meant more than it was supposed to mean.” She swept Sadie’s hair away from her face with both hands. “I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long.”
Sadie sniffed loudly, and a few more tears fell. “Does that mean you don’t mind saying it now? Because I reallydoneedyou to tell me you love me sometimes. I thought I could be fine without it, but I was wrong.”
“I was scared, too,” Anne said quietly. “Not just to say it. To mean it. Because I mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything in my whole life. But I’m not scared now.”
With her palms pressing against the sides of Sadie’s temples, she leaned in and kissed one cheek. Said, again, “I love you,” her own eyes stinging with new tears, and she kissed the wet cheek a second time, her mouth gentle on Sadie’s paper-soft skin. “I love you.” Salt bit at her lips as she moved to kiss Sadie’s nose, kiss the creases on either side of her eyes, kiss her other cheek, her forehead, her chin. “I love you, my beloved—my darling—my dearest—Iloveyou.”
Sadie gasped, shook, cried in what seemed like pure, helpless relief.
“You’re the love of my life, Sadie. I’ll tell you every single day for as long as we live. I’ll tell the world, too. I will. I will. I promise—”
Then, for the first time in nearly a week, they were kissing.
Sadie made faint sounds as her fingers threaded through Anne’s hair. She grabbed at Anne like she wanted to take anything she could touch, pull Anne’s body into her own and make the two indistinguishable.
Anne kissed Sadie until distance became a lie. Her cheeks were wet with Sadie’s relief.
“My love,” Sadie said softly against Anne’s mouth, after a minute or so.
“Yes?” Anything. Anything Sadie wanted. Especially if she kept using that husky voice.
“Will you do something for me?”