Chapter 416: Chapter 416
Aria’s POV
When I arrived home, I stood in the doorway of the living room and did not announce myself.
Lana was on the rug with a picture book, one hand on the page and the other ferrying a cookie to her mouth. She is a little over four years old now.
Rowland was on the sofa, reading aloud with the exaggerated character voices he always used because Lana found them devastating.
He looked up when I appeared. He always knew before I made a sound.
"Hey," he said.
Lana turned, saw me, and dropped the book entirely. "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy—"
I crouched and caught her, pressing my face into her curls and breathing her in the way I still did every time.
"You smell like sugar," I told her.
"Uncle Rowland gave me cookies," she said immediately. Lana had long decided honesty was simply the more efficient policy with me.
I looked at Rowland over her head.
He raised both hands. "She looked at me with that face. I’m only a wolf, Aria. I’m not made of stone."
Lana turned her most serious expression on me. "I only had a few."
"The plate suggests otherwise." She hid her face on my shoulder.
Rowland crossed the room and put his arms around both of us, easy and unhurried. He kissed my temple. "Did you have a good day?"
"It is better now," I said.
Lana wriggled free and returned to her book and her remaining cookies, having decided to be strategically uninvolved in whatever came next.
"We’re still on for tonight?" Rowland asked.
"Absolutely," I said.
Later in the day, before Rowland and I left, I called Nathan.
It was a brief call. I confirmed that he was still picking Aria up on Saturday at nine o’clock. I reminded him about the horse riding he had promised her and he said he would not forget. He sounded like a man who meant it, and three years of co-parenting had taught me to trust that, at least.
Lana adored him. He always showed up for her. She ran to him on Saturdays with her whole body, and he caught her every time like she was the most important thing he had ever been trusted with.
That was enough. More than enough. It was, in its own way, everything. Rowland and Nathan had also had that talk after things between Rowland and I. According to Rowland, he had told him to take care of me and never take me for granted like he did. Rowland had promised him he had nothing to worry about.
I set the phone down, straightened my dress, and went to get ready for dinner with Rowland.
****
The restaurant was small and private. Rowland had reserved the garden terrace table, and the night air smelled of jasmine and warm bread. He fed me from his plate without asking, which I had long stopped pretending to mind.
We talked easily about several things: Lana’s reading, which was advancing at an alarming pace. Kara’s business, which was thriving, setting it up for her had been the least I could do and she had remained grateful for that.
We talked about Logan and Chloe, who had finally arrived at the obvious conclusion about each other and were now in a relationship, Also, Amelia and Francis, whose long distance relationship had become something more serious.
We also talked about Rowland’s new ventures expanding beyond Veridale and Asterfell. It was all a good, uncomplicated conversation between two people who had learned each other well.
Afterward, Rowland took me to the sea.
He gave me his jacket without ceremony and we sat on the low wall above the water, side by side, the city behind us and the sea ahead.
"Do you know what the best day of my life was?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Tell me."
"The day you said yes. Five months ago." He smiled slowly. "I had asked twelve times. You’d sent me away eleven of those times. I was genuinely preparing myself for another no, and then—" He stopped. "It wasn’t."
I remembered it. We were at the park. It was late afternoon. Rowland stood in front of me with that particular stillness of his, and asked me to date him.
I had let myself think, honestly, about what it felt like when he was near. The history between us that ran deeper than recent years. The night he had saved me when we were young and never once made a story of it. The way Lana reached for him. The way my great-aunt and grand-uncle spoke of him. The way he had been, through everything, simply and reliably there.
And I had said yes.
"I love you," he said now, looking at the water.
He had said it many times before. I had received it each time and held it carefully and said nothing, because I had learned the hard way that I would not say those words until I was certain of them all the way down.
I looked at him.
"Rowland," I said. He turned, reading something in my voice.
"I love you," I said.
He went still, looking at me like he was checking that it was real.
"Say it again," he said quietly.
"I love you," I said. "I have for a while now. I just needed to be sure before I said it. You deserve to hear it when I mean it all the way through."
He was on his feet.
He lifted me off the wall and spun me, and he laughed. My wolf rose with him, warm and light and wholly at peace.
When he stopped, his forehead came to rest against mine.
"I have wanted to hear that," he said quietly, "for a very long time."
"I know," I said. "I’m sorry it took me so long."
"Don’t be." He pulled back just enough to look at me. "You gave it to me when it was real. That’s the only way I would have wanted it."
He kissed me then. Slowly. The way you kiss something you are grateful for.
When he pulled back, I breathed in the salt air and the warmth of him, and I thought of my grandmother. I thought of how she had loved me without condition, and how she had believed in a life for me even in the seasons when I could not believe in it myself.
She would have liked Rowland. She would have watched him with Lana and nodded once, quietly, and said nothing more, because she always knew that some things did not need commentary.
I thought of Lana asleep at home. I thought of Nathan arriving Saturday at nine with his whole heart in his hands for his daughter. I thought of Amelia and Chloe and Williams and Jonathan and Logan and Francis and Kara and Grandma Jennifer and everyone who had stood beside me when the ground was uncertain and chose to stay.
I thought of the concrete floor. The silver chains. The eighteen months of pain. And then I thought of everything I had built on the other side of all of that, with my own hands, from nothing.
Rowland tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked at me with the expression of a man who understood completely what he had been given.
"Ready to go home?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
He took my hand. We walked back through the night toward the warm lights of the city, without looking back.
Ahead of us was a life that might be rough but entirely ours.
I had survived everything that should have destroyed me. And now, finally, I was done surviving.
It was time to simply live.
The End.
