Page 94 of Bounced!

My head fell back to the cabinet, hard, and I didn’t care.

It was over.

We’d lost.

Chapter 31

Dante

Mark told me on a Tuesday, in his kitchen. He told me all of it.

I’d known something was wrong for a while. He’d gone quiet in a way that wasn’t his quiet. Mark’s usual tactic when hiding something was to get louder and busier, so the quiet scared me more than shouting would have. I made him sit, and he told me, in the flat voice of a man reading his own criminal charges, that it was over. Meridian had given their final word. There was no number, no structure, no deal that would work.

And then, before I could take that in, he told me the other thing.

He’d mortgaged his house.

“Over half a million,” he said to the counter, not to me. “Against the house. Did it weeks ago. I didn’t tell anybody.” He swallowed. “It’s in the pot. It got us to seven hundred and eighty thousand, which is thirty-nine percent. Which is . . . Dante . . . I gave up my house and it didn’t even . . . it wasn’t even—” He had to stop and gather himself. His next words came out softer, gentler, a whisper made into an apology. “I didn’t tell you because you’d have said, ‘No.’ That’s the whole reason. I did the thing you spent months teaching me not to do, and I did it on purpose, because I knew you’d stop me.”

I sat with that. And here’s the thing I understood, sitting in that kitchen: I couldn’t be angry with Mark. I went looking for the anger, the way you check a pocket for keys, but it wasn’t there. I knew exactly what he’d done and exactly why. I’d have done the same. Two men who spent their whole lives carrying things alone aren’t shocked when the other one does it, too.

He hadn’t betrayed me. He’d just been who he was at the worst possible moment, one last time.

“Mark,” I said. “Look at me.”

He did, and he looked wrecked.

“You’re taking it back out.”

“Dante—”

“The house. Tomorrow. You’re calling the bank, and you’re taking it back out.” I took his hands. “Listen to me. It’s over. You said so yourself. It was over before you signed that paper. I’m not going to watch you lose your bar and your home in the same month for nothing. That’s not happening, not while I’m here.”

“It felt like the last thing I had to give—”

“I know, and that’s why I’m not letting you give it.” I scooted closer and held his face the way he’d held mine a hundred times. “You spent this whole fight telling everybody they didn’t have to carry it alone, and then you snuck off and tried to carry the heaviest piece by yourself, in secret, where nobody could help you. No. Just no. You taught me better than that. It’s ours, remember? You don’t get to take ‘ours’ back the second it gets hard. ‘Ours’ means I get to protect you, too. So let me. Take the house back.”

He broke a little, the big man in the gray beard finally, quietly, in his own kitchen, with my hands on his face. I could tell those weren’t the first tears he’d shed. They took a long while to pass, so I held him and said nothing, my hand rubbing his back while he soaked my shoulder with his grief.

“Okay,” he said.

“Say it,” I insisted, knowing my stubborn man.

“I’ll take the house back out.” He put his forehead against mine. “God. Okay. Okay. I’ve got you, and you’ve got me, right?”

“That’s the whole idea.”

And that was his final surrender.

Not the bar. The bar we’d already lost.

What Mark gave up that Tuesday was the last of his “going it alone,” his belief that love meant being the only one who bled for it. He laid all that down on the kitchen counter next to the failed paperwork and my lukewarm tea.

He took the house back the next morning.

It was the only thing we won all November.

We told the family together, the two of us, because that was the new way of things.