Page 80 of Fate, Interrupted

“Yes,” he says. “She is.”

I turn my head and look at him. He’s looking back at me. Present. Certain. Grounded underneath everything.

“I chose this,” I say.

I see the real warmth underneath it.

“I know.”

“Good,” I say.

“Tell me something,” he says, after a while. “Something about you. Something I probably wouldn’t know about until we’d known each other for years.”

“You mean the fast-track information that turns a new relationship into a do-or-die?”

He nods, smiling. “I promise I won’t run screaming out the door.”

I think about it until I have one.

“I broke into the dean’s office when I was seventeen, a freshman in college,” I say.

He looks at me, eyebrows raised.

Chapter twenty-one

Silas

She tells me about the dean’s office before I’ve finished processing that she’s still here.

Not still here in the literal sense—I know she’s here, I can feel her weight against my side with the blanket she pulled over our legs, her head tipped slightly toward my shoulder. Still here in the other sense. The one that matters.

After I showed my wolf on the sidewalk.

After what her aunt did with her mother’s history in front of me.

After coming home and choosing me and being clear-eyed about it.

She’s still here.

And she’s telling me about breaking into a dean’s office when she was seventeen with the animated energy of someone who has been waiting to tell this story and is pleased with the audience.

“For the record, it never would have happened if the window latch hadn’t already been broken,” she says. “That’s an important detail.”

“It doesn’t help your case,” I say.

“It absolutely helps my case,” she says. “And for the record”…

“There’s no record here.”

“You’re the record,” she says.

“I’m not a legal document.”

“You’re a witness. Witnesses count.”

I look down at her. She has her chin tipped up slightly, the angle I’ve learned she uses when she’s making a case she knows is weak and is committing to it anyway. Her hair is loose from the afternoon, falling around her shoulders. She looks softer in this light than she does anywhere else I’ve seen her..

Easier.