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I lift my head.

"You did this for me in August and wouldn't let me give you anything back." She pushes, and I let her roll me onto my back. "Tonight is for you. Lie still."

It is the hardest thing anyone has ever asked me to do. She takes her time, working her mouth down my chest and across my stomach, following the line where my tan quits. Every muscle in me wants to reach for her and take over and make this about her instead. She feels it, and she pins my wrist to the mattress with one small hand, and I let her keep it there.

When she wraps her fingers around my cock, my hips come up off the bed.

When she puts her mouth on me, slow and wet and in no hurry at all, I have to grip the headboard with my free hand to keep from saying her name loud enough to wake the whole den. She looks up at me while she does it, and it nearly finishes me right there.

"Mackie." It comes out rough. "Come here, or this is going to be over."

She laughs low in her throat, and then she reaches into the nightstand drawer and comes back with a box she drops on my chest.

"I saw them and thought of you," she says.

I laugh so hard I have to put my arm over my face to muffle it, and she's laughing too when she takes the box back out of my hand and gets one open with her teeth.

She rolls it onto me herself, and then she straddles my hips with a knee on either side of me, the way she did on the quilt in front of Hildie's tree, and she lowers herself onto me an inch at a time. She's hot and tight, and she has to stop halfway and breathe, and I hold her hips and wait for her. It's been almost a year. Her eyes close, and when she finally takes all of me, she lets out a long, shaking breath against my neck.

"Okay?" I ask.

"If you ask me that one more time," she whispers, "I'm calling a cab."

I sit up and get my arms around her, chest to chest, and she sets the pace, slow at first and then not slow at all. The tooth taps against my collarbone every time she comes down on me. Her pale scar presses against my stomach, long healed, and I spread one hand across it and hold her against me, and she lets me. I get my other hand between us and find her clit with my thumb, and she tightens around me so hard I can't see straight.

"Carson," she says into my mouth. "Don't stop."

I don't. She comes with her face buried in my shoulder and her teeth set in my skin, shaking in my arms, and I follow her right over the edge with her name in my mouth and my arms locked around her back, and I say her name into her hair like it's the only word I have left.

For a long time, neither of us moves.

The monitor crackles, and we both freeze. Graham lets out one small sigh through the speaker and goes quiet again. Mackie laughs against my chest, and I laugh with her, and she reaches over and turns the volume down a notch without getting up.

"You're going to want to go check on them," she says.

"I am."

"Stay here five more minutes first."

So I do. She falls asleep on my chest before the five minutes are up, with her hand spread over my heart and the leather cord tangled in my fingers. Down the hall, my children are asleep in a house I'm not leaving in the morning, and the woman who called me at three in the morning is asleep on top of me. For the second time in my life, there is nothing in front of me that wants fixing.

Epilogue

There's a song in the air / There's a star in the sky / There's a mother's deep prayer / And a baby's low cry

One Year Later

Boone, the dog steals a cinnamon roll off the counter at seven-twelve Christmas morning.

I know the exact time because Hildie is standing on one of the kitchen chairs in footie pajamas, Graham is beating a wooden spoon against the cabinet door, and Carson is at the stove making eggs when the whole plate slides sideways.

“Boone.”

The dog freezes with half the roll hanging out of his mouth.

Carson points the spatula at him. “Drop it.”

Boone doesn’t drop it.