“Sometimes,” I admitted. “But it’s not her I miss. It’s the shape of having someone. The connection. I liked being a husband; most guys complain about it—I never did. I liked having a partner. Someone to come home to, who knew how I took my coffee and didn’t have to ask.”
I looked down at her. My voice dropped lower, the corner of my mouth pulling up.
“Though I’ll say this—whatever dark, rough thing with sex you’ve got going on, Sloane, is significantly more my speed than Sadie’s vanilla approach ever came close to.”
She stiffened against me, her shoulders started shaking with a laugh she tried and failed to suppress.
“Oh my god,” she muttered into my chest.
“I’m just being honest.”
“You’re being terrible.”
“Also honest.”
She laughed again, quieter this time, and the sound of it—real, unguarded, warm—did something to my insides.
The laughter faded into a comfortable silence. Her fingers played with mine beneath the blanket, tracing the lines of my knuckles, the rough calluses on my palms.
Then she spoke, soft and serious again.
“You would have been a good dad.”
The words hit me somewhere deep and unprotected. A place I’d stopped visiting a long time ago.
My throat tightened.
I squeezed her hand.
“Maybe,” I said. “Guess we’ll never know.”
The boat continued its slow path through the dark ocean. Jeff and Ethan’s voices drifted back to us in quiet fragments—heading adjustments, watch schedules, the mundane logistics of staying alive.
Sloane rested her head against my chest again. I could hear her breathing—steady now, calmer than it had been all day.
After a minute, she asked softly, “Do you regret it? The marriage?”
I looked down at the top of her head, her hair moving slightly in the wind, the starlight catching the lighter strands.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Parts of it. The years I spent chasing something that had already ended. The conversations I never started. The mornings I left before she woke up.”
Then I paused.
“But not now.”
She tilted her head slightly. “Why not now?”
I tightened my arms around her, drew her closer against my chest until I could rest my chin on the top of her head.
“Because somehow,” I said quietly, “in the middle of the goddamn apocalypse, I ended up right here. With you.”
She didn’t respond with words.
But her fingers laced through mine and held on—tight, deliberate, certain—and she pressed her lips against my hand in a kiss so small and tender it nearly broke me.
I turned my head and kissed her hair. Let my mouth lingerthere, breathing her in.
“Stay with me,” she whispered. Not a question. Not a demand. Something in between—a request made fragile by everything we’d already lost and everything we still stood to lose.