Page 152 of Yours to Keep
“I’m done fighting just to survive. I want to live. I want that life with you. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life just surviving. I want to stand beside you. Be with you.”
His voice cracks as he squeezes my hand. “I wished for you, CJ. You are my everything.”
Hearing him say it out loud feels like something inside me finally settles. He kisses me again, soft and slow, then pulls back and looks at me like he can see straight through everything I am.
Then he says, “Oh, and I want a dog.”
I stare at him for a second, then laugh.
“Okay, Baby Boy,” I whisper, pulling him closer and holding him a little tighter. “Always together.”
* * *
The house has to go.
For Eli.
It holds too much pain. Too many memories. Too many nights where he was made to feel small, like he didn’t matter.
Not anymore.
We make it back inside, where Mack and Silas have Finn settled on the couch. He’s lying there with his eyes closed, but his eyes fly open the moment he hears us.
“Eli!” he calls out, trying to push himself up.
Deck is on him instantly, guiding him back down. “Stay.”
I let Eli go, and I watch as he crosses the room and drops to his knees beside Finn. He goes straight into nurse mode: checking injuries, asking Mack and Silas questions, focused, precise. Finn just lets him, watching him like he needs to prove he’s real.
When Eli is satisfied, he sits back on the floor and takes Finn’s hand.
Then he stands, his gaze drifting across the coffee table. His eyes lock onto his fingers.
There’s a crack in the glass. I remember him telling me about it, the night Adrian slammed his head into it.
My jaw tightens.
I move to the shelf, pick up a heavy ornament, and carry it over, placing it into Eli’s hand. He takes it without a word. Deck moves Finn carefully away from the couch, and I step back as Eli faces the table, the place that holds too many of his worst memories.
He lifts the ornament and brings it down.
The crack is sharp, violent, raw. The sound punches through the quiet. It feels like the first real breath he’s taken since we found him.
He hits it again, and again, each strike breaking something deeper than glass. The table fractures beneath him, but this isn’t destruction; it’s reclamation. Every blow is a moment Adrian stole from him, given back. A goodbye to what was done to him here. A release.
Eli lets out a broken sound as the glass gives way, tears running down his face, breath uneven, arms shaking as he keeps going, until finally he stops.
Breathing hard, sweat on his skin, his tears still falling, he smiles. Wide.
It’s done.
* * *
Deck stands, and we move into the kitchen. It doesn’t feel like movement anymore; it feels like crossing a threshold we’ve all been carrying inside us for years.
Phones come out, and calls are made one after another, quietbut steady, voices tight with something that isn’t just anger anymore. It’s exhaustion. It’s grief. It’s the kind of fury that only exists after you’ve lived too long under someone else’s shadow. There are no shaking hands, no hesitation.
This is a shared understanding that this is the end of Adrian’s reach. The end of Adrian, completely and utterly eradicated.
