Page 231 of At First Catch

“That if I could just fix one more problem...finish one more repair...figure out one more number...then I’d finally deserve to come home to you.”

Tears blur my vision.

“The stupid part?” His laugh catches painfully. “I already had the one thing I’d been trying to earn.”

His voice drops almost to a whisper. “You. And you know what finally broke me?” he asks.

I shake my head once.

“The marina didn’t feel like home without you in it anymore.”

And just like that—every broken piece of my heart cracks wide open again.

And quickly every ounce of distance I fought so hard to maintain over the past few days starts collapsing beneath the weight of how honestly he’s looking at me right now.

Tears blur my vision while sunlight spills across the lighthouse floor between us.

God, I missed him.

Him.

The man beneath all the fear, overprotectiveness, and panic. The man who loved me so deeply it terrified him. The man standing in front of me now finally understanding that love isn’t something you control into safety.

Nolan takes another careful step toward me. Still cautious. Like he knows he hurt me and doesn’t assume this gets fixed simply because he finally understands what went wrong.

“I should’ve listened to you sooner,” he says.

Emotion catches sharply in my throat.

For weeks that’s all I wanted: honesty, partnership, trust.

Nolan’s fingers tighten around the rolled house plans beneath his arm. Nervousness flickers visibly across his face and the sight nearly destroys me.

“I need you to know something,” he says.

I wipe quickly beneath my eyes, trying to steady myself enough to breathe through this conversation.

“What?”

His gaze locks fully onto mine.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I loved you enough to want forever.”

The words hit directly in the center of my chest. Painfully. Perfectly. Part of me still feared maybe the breakup changed that. This new knowledge loosens something aching inside me.

Nolan exhales.

“But I think…” He glances down briefly before forcing himself to continue. “I think I spent most of my life believing permanence had to be earned through sacrifice.”

Nolan’s eyes return to mine. “And when I got scared of losing everything, I started trying to control all of it.”

Nolan shifts the house plans into one hand before speaking again. “I bought the house behind the marina.”

The world tilts beneath me. “What?”

His mouth twitches faintly. “The old one with the wraparound porch.”

I stare at him as memories flash through my head all at once. The way he used to look toward that house absentmindedly. The kitchen layout conversations. The mornings we joked about domesticity. “You bought it?”