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“I’m glad tonight went well, all things considered,” I whispered. I wasn’t about to touch on all the very personal things the team knew about him and me, but at the end of the day, they didn’t matter. All that did matter was the people he had in his corner. “Have I told you today that I love you?”

“No,” Theo said, shaking his head. I pulled back slightly to study his handsome face, committing every soft detail to memory. The warmth in his eyes. The faint flush in his cheeks. The little smile that appeared whenever he looked at me.

For so long I’d believed loving someone meant giving them the power to hurt me. And maybe I’d been right. Theo could hurt me, and losing him would probably destroy me in ways I couldn’t imagine.

But standing there with him, I realized I no longer feared that ending. In fact, I couldn’t picture that as an ending for us at all. Unknown variables would always be thrown our way. Our careers would change, and our plans would shift. There would forever be things we could never predict or control. I’d spent my entire life believing that if I could identify enough variables and account for enough possibilities, I could protect myself from the outcomes I feared most.

People didn’t work that way.

Theo certainly didn’t.

No equation could guarantee our future. No model I could build that accounted for every obstacle we might face. But somehow, for the first time, I didn’t need one.

Because of all the things in my life I’d ever questioned, calculated, or planned contingencies for, Theo had become the one thing I’d never been more certain about. I trusted him, and I believed in us.

“I love you, little wolf.”

EPILOGUE

Rhodes

one and a half years later

Why is it so fucking cold?”

“Because it’s still early April!” I exclaimed. After two delayed flights, almost an entire day stuck in the airport, one fight at the car rental desk, and over an hour stuck in the car together, exhaustion and frustration had us at each other’s throats. “You grew up here. You should know this.”

“Eh.” Jude shrugged. “It was never this cold.”

“It was always this cold,” I retorted. April was always questionable when it came to Maine weather. We were just as likely to get snow as we were to have sunshine and a warm breeze. Granted, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Snow in late April was unusual, but I had to believe it was a sign of good luck, all things considered. “You just got used to Florida.”

Which, admittedly, hadn’t taken him long. A year and a half ago, the idea of Jude moving into my house had felt like something we’d probably regret within a month. There had definitely been some growing pains. I liked things where I left them. Jude treated every available surface like temporary storage. I liked quiet mornings. He believed music sounded better when it rattled. We’d fought about dishes, groceries, laundry, boundaries, and everything else from sun up to sun down.

But somewhere between all the arguments, we’d figured each other out.

His fitness account had exploded once he stopped trying so hard to be whatever he thought people wanted to see. As it turned out, people liked Jude best when he was just Jude—smart, ridiculous, occasionally inappropriate, and able to turn a workout video into a tangent about something he’d learned at three in the morning when he couldn’t sleep.

When he started talking seriously about personal training, I’d invested enough to help him turn it into a real business. He’d fought me on that too, insisting he didn’t want a handout. I’d had to remind him that an investment came with the expectation he’d make me money someday. I just didn’t tell him I had no intentions of cashing in on that investment. I was just proud of him and everything he was creating for himself.

He was still chaotic—that part of him was permanent—but he wasn’t restless anymore. There was a confidence to him that hadn’t been there before. He had work he cared about, plans that belonged entirely to him, and a life he was building because he wanted it, not because anyone had told him what he was supposed to become.

And through it all, my little brother had become one of my favorite people in the world. Not that I would ever fucking tell him that.

Theo and I had found our rhythm too. It hadn’t always been easy. His final season had kept him moving constantly, while my work had me bouncing between Florida, launches, meetings, and the occasional trip back to Maine whenever I could justify it. There had been delayed flights, missed weekends, late-night phone calls from hotel rooms, and more than one conversation held half-asleep because it was the only time our schedules overlapped.

But we made it work. We planned ahead. We put an emphasis on communication. When one of us was struggling, we said it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours. I’d never been so certain in us, and I’d never been so happy either.

His football career had taken off in ways even I hadn’t anticipated. The closer we got to the draft, the more attention followed him. His agent’s phone never seemed to stop ringing, and several teams had shown enough interest that Theo had finally stopped pretending there was still a chance he wouldn’t hear his name called in the draft. I’d stopped entertaining that possibility a long time ago.

Where he ended up was now the unknown variable—not if he would.

And that’s what had brought us back to Everdale.

The GOAT was hosting a draft party. His current team, along with a handful of players who had already graduated, planned to camp out in the living room and any other inch of the house they could to celebrate Theo. From what Jude had been told as I drove in, there was enough food, alcohol, and nervous energy to power half the state. Some things never changed.

“It’s weird,” Jude said as I parked along the curb down the street. It was the closest spot we could find, and we still had to walk almost two blocks. “Being back here, I mean.”

Jude hadn’t returned to Everdale since he left. He wasn’t ready, and I couldn’t blame him. He caught every single one of Theo’s games on the college’s network and texted Wyatt and Theo damn near constantly. While he could separate them with everything that happened here, he just wasn’t ready to make the trip in person.