Page 103 of Mending Hearts
Rafe blinks. “Stay?”
“For dinner. For the night. For as long as you need.”
He hesitates, then looks at me. I nod, and he turns back to his mom. “Okay. I’ll tell Vinny.”
His mom waves a hand. “He stays too.”
Rafe smiles faintly. “He’ll insist on a hotel.”
His dad nods knowingly. “He always does.”
There’s warmth in the room now. Rafe steps away to call Vinny, his voice low and professional.
His parents turn to me. His mom reaches for my hand again. “Family is not only blood,” she says quietly. “In Mexico, we sayla familia es donde te quieren.”
“Family is where they love you,” his dad clarifies, nodding. “And love is not afraid of the sun.”
The words settle over me. The future is starting to feel like something I’m no longer bracing for. It feels like something I might be allowed to have.
Rafe comes back into the room, eyes soft as he looks at me. For the first time since I walked back into his life, I don’t feel like I’m begging for space. I feel like I’m being welcomed into it.
16
RAFE
My mother does not believein subtlety.
“You sleep there,” she says, pointing down the hallway like she’s assigning seats at dinner.
“Mamá—” I start.
She lifts a brow at me. The same one she used when I was seventeen and thought I knew everything. “You are married.”
I open my mouth, close it again, and Ollie makes a strangled sound beside me, somewhere between amusement and panic.
“I just thought,” I try carefully, “maybe separate rooms. Until?—”
“Until what?” she cuts in. “You forget you are husbands?”
My father coughs into his fist to hide a smile.
“It is ridiculous,” my mother declares. “You think I will faint because you share a bed? I already survived you in your teenage years.”
“Mamá.”
She waves me off and hands Ollie a spare towel like this is the most normal domestic situation in the world. “Sheets are clean. Windows stick a little. Do not break anything.”
Ollie’s mouth twitches like he’s fighting laughter. “Yes, ma’am.”
She looks deeply satisfied with that response.
My father claps me on the shoulder as we head down the hallway. “You’re five in dog years,” he mutters. “Go to bed.”
“I’m thirty-three,” I correct automatically.
“Dog years,” he repeats.
Ollie laughs softly beside me, and the tension that’s been braided through the entire day loosens a notch. It’s absurd, really. Yesterday we were dodging paparazzi and processing a knife attack and untangling twelve years of secrets. Now my mother is assigning us a room like we’re teenagers home for the holidays.
