Page 136 of Cruel Kiss

"I built a machine to catch liars," I say. "It takes a thousand pieces of a person, chews them up, and out the other side comes the truth, whether you want it or not. I ran you through it more than once, Ronan Akov. The numbers were never in your favor." Navi cackles from his folding chair. "But I chose you anyway. Despite the data. Against every receipt I own. And it turns out that sometimes the machine is wrong and the person is right, and the only way you can ever find that out is to close your eyes and stop counting and just—" I press my hand against his chest, over his heart. "—feel it."

He covers my hand with his.

"I love you," I say. "And I'm keeping you. There's no napkin left to hand back, so you're stuck. Forever."

The last of the dying sun lights up his eyes. Sparks of brilliant gold swirling amongst the gray and blue oceans.

"Now, kiss," Hayden orders. "That's how it ends. I've seen it twice."

Ronan starts to bend. But before he can kiss me, a small voice cuts in. "Wait!"

We both look down. Isabella has set the shoebox on the dock and is standing there with her hands on her hips, looking up at Ronan with an expression I know very well, because it's mine.

"I have a question," she says.

Ronan crouches down to her level. Never towering. Always down where she can look him in the eye. "Ask me anything, brave girl."

"Are you gonna stay forever?" she asks. "For real this time."

Unlike last time, when she asked him this on the night he thought he might die and never come back to us, Ronan doesn't look at me.

He looks ather.

"Yes," he says. "For real. Forever."

Isabella nods slowly, satisfied. But she's not done.

"Then can I stop calling you Mister?"

Something goes haywire in Ronan's face. Shock and surprise, like the best kind of stab to the heart. "You've been calling me Mister Ronan for a long time," he manages to rasp out.

"Yeah, I know." She taps her bare toe against the dock. "But that's a name for somebody who might leave. And you said you're not leaving. So it's a dumb name now."

He has to clear his throat before he can answer. "What would you like to call me instead?"

She looks at me. She looks at Hayden. She looks back at Ronan, this huge man folded down small on a dock so a six-year-old can see his face.

"Papa," she chooses. "I want to call you Papa. Is that okay?"

I watch it hit him.

Every hard thing in this man comes apart on a dock at sunset, quiet, no sound at all, just his eyes going misty and his jaw going tight and his big scarred hands going open and closed at his sides like he doesn't know what to do with them.

"Yes," he croaks. "That's okay. That's more than okay, Isabella. You can call me that."

She throws her arms around his neck. He catches her and stands, lifting her up, and she tucks her face into his shoulder like she does when she's tired, except she's not tired, she's just happy.

Hayden butts in. "So are you gonna kiss Mom now, or what? We gotta do things in the right order."

Ronan laughs, loud and carefree. "Right you are, little man. Now, where was I?"

He kisses me.

One arm still holds Isabella. The other hand comes up to my face, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, and he kisses me like this is the one that means more than the rest of them put together. Our lips mesh and our tongues clash, my breath sighing into his and his back into mine. The autumn sun filtering through the canopy warms our backs.

The kiss makes one thing clear: The paper marriage is gone.

We burned that stupid paper. We burned the letter, and the napkin, and the trauma, and the past. There's nothing left of the deal I wrote to protect myself, nothing left of the cage either ofus built. There's just this. A thing we chose. A thing we keep choosing, out loud, in the light, in front of the people who love us.