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Cam.

I'd seen her after wins, in the tunnel, with the adrenaline still right under her skin. I'd seen her at Isla's table, being cracked open by people who loved her. I'd seen her in her own bed at three in the morning, unguarded in the way she only ever was when she forgot to be careful. I'd seen her face in the seconds before she kissed me the first time, and I'd thought that was the most undone she could ever look.

I was wrong.

She was in dark jeans and a gray henley she'd clearly been wearing all day. Her hair was down. Her keys were still in her hand, and her hand was shaking, the same way it had shaken on her own front steps the night I went home with her. She was standing a little back from the door, like she'd stood out there in the hallway for a while before she knocked. Like she'd driven across the entire city and then needed a minute in the dark outside my apartment to find the nerve. Cam Russo, who walked into arenas full of twenty-three thousand people without breaking stride, had stood outside 3C next to my dying succulent and been afraid to knock.

And her face.

I'd spent weeks learning to read Cam's face. I'd learned to catch the truth in the quarter-second before she locked it away. But this wasn't a quarter-second. It was all of it, right at the surface, with nowhere left to hide. Twelve years of hiding and one night of bravery and twenty-five minutes of not knowing if I'd open the door were written across her face at once. There was fear in it, and hope, and a love I recognized, finally and completely, because I'd been carrying the same one for weeks in a place I hadn't let myself look.

She looked at me like I was the only fixed point in the entire city.

My throat closed.

I didn't feel it coming. One second, I was looking at her, and the next, I was just done. Three weeks of holding it at arm's length came apart at once. The sleepless nights and the Instagram spirals and the date that went nowhere and forty-something readings of a post with my name in its last line, without my name in it. All of it broke open because she was here, and she was real, and she had actually done it, and she had stood outside my door not knowing if I'd let her in.

She moved before I could say a word. She crossed the threshold the way she crossed half court on a fast break, like the decision had been made somewhere beneath thought, and one arm came around my back, and one hand cradled the back of my head and pulled me in. I grabbed the front of her henley with both fists, pressed my face into her chest, and fell apart.

She held on like she was the one who needed it.

Her heart was slamming under my cheek, too fast for a woman who controlled the pace of a game like breathing. Her arms were trembling, or I was. I couldn't figure out whose fault it was, and I was in no condition to investigate.

"I'm here." Her voice was barely more than breath against the top of my head. "I'm here. I'm here."

She said it over and over. She wasn't only saying it to steady me. She was saying it the way you say a truth out loud because you need to hear it yourself.

I'm here. The door opened. I made it. I'm here.

I held on until the worst of it passed.

Then I pulled back far enough to look up at her.

She was crying too. Silent tears ran down both her cheeks, and she hadn't done anything about them. She hadn't wiped them away or turned her face or put her expression back into order. She was just standing in my doorway, crying, like it had never occurred to her to hide it.

That was new. That was the part that nearly took me out at the knees.

And then I saw her wrist.

Her hand was still curled in the back of my T-shirt, and her sleeve had pushed up, and there was a black hair tie on her right wrist. It was stretched out and a little frayed, sitting right on top of the little line of numbers tattooed on the inside of her wrist.

It was mine. I knew it was mine. I'd lost it somewhere in her house the night we were together and assumed it was gone forever, because hair ties go wherever socks go when they die.

"Is that..." My voice cracked in half. "Cam. Is that my hair tie?"

She looked down at her own wrist like she'd forgotten it was there. Then she looked back at me, and her face crumpled in a way I had never seen it do.

"I found it by the door," she said. "The night after you left. It had one of your curls still wrapped around it." She swallowed. "I haven't taken it off. I wore it in my locker during games. I've slept in it every night for three weeks."

I made a sound I'd never made before in my life.

"You've been wearing my hair tie," I said, "for three weeks."

"Yeah."

"Like a Victorian widow with a locket."

Her laugh came out wet and broken. "Something like that, yeah."