“Your hair,” she says, reaching up with her other hand, her smile deepening. I have no idea what state it’s in. I don’t care at all.
“Is it terrible?”
“It’s a disaster.” She sounds delighted about it. She combs through it with her fingers, unhurried, and I feel that specific pleasure move down the back of my neck, the kind that makes your eyelids heavy.
“You look like a normal person,” she says.
“Devastating.”
She laughs—quiet, real, just air through her nose—and keeps doing it, smoothing my hair back like she’s got nothing else to do and nowhere to be. Maybe for this hour, we don’t. Maybe this is the one hour the world is going to leave us alone, and I’m going to spend every second of it memorizing the exact temperature of her hand and the exact shade of her eyes in this light. In this light they’re this translucent green, with little magical golden dots surrounding the iris. I should have had years by now to map the constellation of each golden speck.
I reach out and tuck a piece of her hair back from her face—just because it’s there, just because I can—and she lets me, her eyes on mine.
“Last night,” she starts, then stops.
“Yeah,” I grin, because I know what she means without her finishing the sentence. Last night was its own category of thing.The kind that reorganizes your sense of whatbeforeandaftermean.
She nods slowly. Her thumb traces a small, unconscious shape on my chest—back and forth, back and forth. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it, and I don’t tell her, because I want her to keep doing it for approximately the rest of my life.
“I meant it,” she says.
Just that.
I know she means the other thing.
The three-word thing she said more than once in the dark when it just came out of her like something her body couldn’t hold back. I know she means it. But hearing hersayshe meant it in the morning light—that lands.
I find her hand on my chest and hold it still, just for a second.
“I know,” I say, and then because I mean it too and have meant it for the better part of my adult life: “I meant it too. Every time. Every version. I love you.”
She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t flinch or hedge or qualify it. She just lies there and holds my gaze and lets it be true.
Her lips curve, small and private, as if the smile is just for the two of us and always has been.
We stay there.
The light moves.
Neither of us talks.
Then Harper’s expression shifts—just slightly enough that I suspect the outside world has come knocking atherbrain, even if mine’s finally at rest.
“Have we heard anything about Dad?” she asks. Her voice is still sleep-rough as she props herself up on her fist.
“My priest friend’s been working every channel he has to try to get any information,” I say. “But the prison keeps stonewalling and saying Silas isn’t accepting visitors. We don’t know if it’s true or not.”
Harper collapses back against the pillow, hands over her face.
I watch her carry the guilt she’s been dragging around for ten years over something that was never her fault. I hate it for her, but I also understand it really deeply. Whoever tries to control the universe with magical thinkingdoesn’tblame themselves when everything goes wrong? I just hate that she’s carried it alone all this time.
Then something rearranges in my brain. The kind of click that happens when a pattern resolves—when the numbers finally line up and you see what you were actually looking at.
I sit up.
“You know, we always assumed it was McKenzie who planted the weed in your locker.”
Harper uncovers her face to peek at me from between her fingers. “What do you mean?”