Page 20 of My Apocalypse Rescuer

I watch from the east wall. The settlement is buzzing like a little beehive.

Dutch comes up beside me and leans on the railing beside me and we look at the treeline together.

"Cole wants to meet about the directed herd situation," he says. "Kate's been running the data. Something bigger is coordinating those attacks."

"I've read her reports."

"We'll need to go out again. Both of us."

"I know." I glance at him. "You're not asking permission."

"I'm telling you first." He bumps his shoulder against mine. "There's a difference."

"Noted."

Below us Jenna runs a group through defensive positions, her voice carrying up clear and certain. Near the gate Harry's briefing the afternoon watch. Ruth is a patch of color in the garden.

"I love you," he says. Simply.

"I know." I step into him. "I love you too."

He kisses me on the wall in full view of the entire settlement, which he started doing about three months ago and which has become, apparently, just a thing that happens now. Below us Jenna pauses her drill long enough to make a face at the nearest recruit.

"I'm going to start making you run laps," I call down to her.

"You'd have to run them too!" she calls back.

"She's not wrong," Dutch says.

"I know she's not wrong. Shut up."

He laughs. I feel it against my shoulder where we're pressed together.

There's a threat building somewhere in the network, bigger than Old Hawk, and we'll go out to meet it and come back, and the walls will hold. That's what I know now that I didn't know three years ago, screaming into a radio while everything came down: the holding is not a one-time thing. It's not something you achieve. It's what you choose, every day, for as long as you can.

I choose it. I choose him. I choose this.

The light goes long and gold across everything we built, and I let myself feel the full weight of it and it feels like enough.

More than enough.