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Emma reaches the SUV before me and opens the passenger door. I keep Celeste’s photograph tucked against my chest as I pass her.

Her hand closes around my arm. “You okay?”

I glance at Celeste smiling among the women she helped before turning back to Emma. “Yeah. I think I am.”

She squeezes my arm and climbs inside.

I place the photograph between us before getting behind the wheel, and Emma reaches across the console as I pull away from Nora’s house.

I lace my fingers through hers and head home with more of Celeste’s story than I came here expecting to find.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Emma

SEPTEMBER 1ST

Bane has been quieter since we pulled away from Nora’s house, although the silence feels different from the one that followed us there this morning.

Every few miles, I glance at the photograph resting on the console, where Celeste smiles from the center of a group of women whose lives she changed without ever expecting anyone to know what she’d done.

Her work reached out without either of them knowing it would, connecting Bane to the shelters and eventually to the company he built afterward.

When I look over again, the tension that followed him into Nora’s house has eased. His attention stays on the road, but there’s something lighter in the set of his jaw.

“You’re staring at me,” he says.

I turn toward the windshield. “I’m pregnant. I’m allowed to stare wherever I want.”

“That’s convenient.”

“There are very few advantages to growing two people at once, so I’m taking this one.”

His mouth curves before he checks the mirror and changes lanes.

I shift against the seat belt as one of the babies moves beneath my ribs. They’ve been relatively peaceful since we left Nora’s, and I’m enjoying the temporary reprieve before one of them remembers my bladder exists.

The photograph catches my attention again.

I’ve nearly told Bane I love him more times than I can count over the last few months, but something has always given me a reason to wait. The babies changed everything between us before either of us understood what we were becoming, Spencer kept finding ways to intrude, and then Celeste’s past opened another part of Bane that he’d kept closed for years.

Watching him with Nora today stripped away the last excuse I’ve been using.

“Bane?”

He glances over before returning his attention to the road. “Yeah?”

“Everything’s fine, so don’t start worrying.” I adjust the seat belt away from my stomach and make myself keep going before I can reconsider it. “I need to tell you something, and apparently I’ve made it much harder in my head than it needs to be.”

His eyebrows draw together, but he waits.

“I spent four years thinking love was supposed to be difficult, like if I worked hard enough at it, eventually I’d earn the part where I got to be happy.” I watch his profile as his grip changes around mine. “You’ve never made me earn anything, and I love you, Bane.”

He looks at me before his attention snaps back to the road, and his throat works as though I’ve knocked every response out of him.

Several seconds pass.

“Bane?”