Page 367 of Face Off

Those truths can exist together.

Knowing what I know today, I regret so much that I sometimes struggle to breathe beneath it. I can’t be entirely ungrateful for where the destruction brought me because my eyes are open now.

Getting here has been hell.

It is also turning me into a woman I love to my core.

The outside will probably always be the part of myself I fight. The woman inside matters more now. I know her. I trust her. I am proud of her, even when she is afraid.

She loves you without needing you to save her.

She wants you without believing wanting gives her ownership of you.

She is still jealous, possessive, occasionally irrational, and deeply committed to pizza.

She is also honest enough to tell you she isn’t ready to call yet.

I hope you can wait a little longer.

Charm

I reach the end and remain there.

Briggs sits beside me while the apartment fills with every life Charm has just placed between us. A small wedding. Planned appointments. Hard days. Honest fear. A kitchen containing too many pizza boxes. Her body changing through a pregnancy neither of us would enter blindly. Her hand reaching for mine without making me responsible for whether she remains standing.

She hasn’t offered me the woman I lost.

She has offered me the woman she is.

Hope moves through me so violently that anger rises to defend against it.

“She knew,” I say.

Briggs looks up. “Knew what?”

“About Lance. Maybe not all of it, but enough. She heard what he said about people like me and kept refusing to name it.”

“That has to hurt.”

“She took me into that fucking house.”

“I know.”

“She stood in that study and let me believe I was insane for expecting her to choose me after she promised she would.”

“I know, Ry.”

“She saw my history as some tragic fucking story until her father threw photographs onto a table and made it real.”

My voice grows louder, but Briggs doesn’t ask me to lower it.

“She knew enough to have protected me before any of it happened.”

“Yes.”

The answer strikes cleanly because he doesn’t weaken it with an excuse.

I leave the chair and pace toward the windows. Milwaukee spreads beneath me, city lights breaking across streets still wet from rain while traffic continues without caring what has shifted inside this room.