He reached me before I’d fully closed the distance myself, both of us moving at once, and then his hands were on my face and mine were fisted in the front of his jacket and the room around us simply stopped existing for several seconds that felt, somehow, both impossibly long and not nearly long enough.
“You did it,” he said, voice rough, forehead pressed against mine.
“You actually did it.”
“I did it my way. Just like I said I would.”
“You were extraordinary up there. I’ve never—” He pulled back enough to actually look at me, eyes bright, something close to awe still moving across his face.
“I’ve never watched anyone be that brave in real time. I kept thinking, the whole way through it, that I didn’t deserve to be standing in the same room as whoever that was.”
“You’re standing in the same room as the same person who’s been making you bad coffee jokes for a month, Fenrir. Nothing about me actually changed tonight. I just stopped hiding the parts that were already there.”
Somewhere behind us, the room had started to applaud again, a few scattered whistles mixed in, and I realized, distantly, that we’d become a second, unplanned spectacle, the room’s collective attention shifting from the speech itself to the two of us standing in the middle of the floor holding onto each other like neither of us trusted the ground not to disappear.
“Can we go somewhere quieter?” I asked.
“I think we still have a few things to actually finish saying to each other.”
“Yes,” he said immediately.
“God, yes.”
We didn’t make it far before Wren intercepted us, throwing both arms around my neck with enough force to nearly knock me over, Beck right behind her doing the same to Fenrir with significantly less grace and considerably more enthusiasm.
“You did it,” Wren said into my shoulder, voice thick.
“You actually did it, you absolute menace, I’m so proud of you I could throw up.”
“That’s quite a compliment.”
“Take it. It’s the best one I’ve got tonight.” She pulled back, wiping her eyes, glancing between me and Fenrir with the specific satisfied look of a woman who’d called this exact outcome weeks ago and had every intention of mentioning it again later.
“Go. Talk. We’ll hold down the fort and field questions from anyone who tries to ambush you for a quote.”
“I’ll tell Iris you’re stepping out for air,” Lark added, appearing from somewhere with Tobias trailing behind her, both of them beaming.
“Take your time. Nobody important is going anywhere.”
We found a small side terrace off the main ballroom a few minutes later, string lights strung along the railing in a way that pulled, instantly and unbidden, at the memory of a different backyard, a different set of lights, a different version of both of us still figuring out how much of the truth either one of us could survive saying out loud.
“I need to apologize properly,” Fenrir said, once the terrace door had closed behind us, muting the party down to a soft, distant hum.
“Not the version I gave you in the conference room. That was me explaining myself. I want to actually apologize.”
“Okay.”
“I told myself silence was generosity, but it wasn’t, not really. It was me being too scared to risk you pulling away if I said something directly, so I built a kind, careful-sounding excuse around the exact same cowardice I’ve been running from my whole life. You were right, on the balcony. I don’t get to decide unilaterally what protecting you looks like. I should have told you the second I was sure, and trusted you to handle the truth, the same way I’m asking you to trust me with all of yours.”
I let the words land fully before responding, the way Sal had taught me without meaning to, sitting with the weight of something instead of rushing past it toward relief.
“I forgive you,” I said slowly.
“I want to be honest, though — it’s not instant. I think some part of me is still going to flinch, every once in a while, remembering that you knew, that whole week, while I was working up the courage to tell you something you’d already graded. That’s going to take time to fully settle, even with the apology. Is that okay? Can you handle loving someone who’s not entirely healed yet?”
“I’ve been loving someone who wasn’t entirely healed yet since I was twelve years old,” he said, something soft and certain underneath it.
“I’m not scared of that, Clancy. I’m scared of the version where you decide healing means doing it without me. That’s the only ending I actually can’t survive.”
“I’ve been loving someone who wasn’t entirely healed yet since I was twelve years old,” he said, something soft and certain underneath it.
“I’m not scared of that, Clancy. I’m scared of the version where you decide healing means doing it without me. That’s the only ending I actually can’t survive.”
“That’s not the ending I’m planning.”
“I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly, even if the answer’s not the one I’m hoping for.” He turned slightly on the bench, taking both my hands in his.
“Do you think we’re going to keep doing this? Managing each other’s truths instead of just handing them over? Because I don’t want to spend the next however-many years catching myself doing the same thing I did with Red, and I don’t want you spending it bracing for the version of me that decides silence is safer than risking your reaction.”
“I think we’re both going to slip sometimes. I think that’s just what happens when two people learned the same lesson the hard way, at almost the same age, from almost the same kind of loss.” I squeezed his hands.
“But I think the difference now is we actually know to watch for it. We get to catch each other doing it, instead of just discovering it eleven years later in a backyard, or a week and a half later in a conference room.”
“That’s a generous way to put something that’s still going to be hard sometimes.”
“I’ve had a really good teacher recently, about generous ways to talk about things that broke,” I said, and the small, surprised laugh that broke out of him was worth every single one of the past two days’ worth of dread.
“Good,” he said, and pulled me into him again, slower this time, less desperate than the embrace in the ballroom, more like two people finally allowing themselves to simply stand still in the same place without bracing for the ground to move.
“For what it’s worth,” he added, after a while, “Sterling-Vance’s lead called Iris about ten minutes after you left the podium. Deal’s confirmed, contracts to follow. I genuinely don’t think either of us was thinking about that even slightly while it was happening, which feels like exactly the right amount of priority to have given it.”
“I forgot the deal existed the second I started talking up there.”
“So did I, watching you.” He laughed, soft, disbelieving.
“Iris is going to be insufferable about this for months, you understand. She’ll take full credit for ‘creating the conditions’ or some equally corporate phrase, and none of us will be able to stop her, because technically she’s not even wrong.”
“I can live with that.”
“I have something for you,” I said, once we’d settled onto a small bench near the railing, his arm around my shoulders, the city’s lights spread out beneath us in the kind of view that made the whole terrible, wonderful month feel, briefly, like it had been building toward exactly this. Read the latest chapters at novelping dot com.
I pulled the small wooden box from my jacket pocket and pressed it into his hands.
He turned it over, found the dark inlay running through one corner, traced it with his thumb the way Sal had, the way I had, the same instinctive gesture every single person who touched that box seemed to make without being told to.
“What is this?”
“A man named Sal made it. Last night, in his shop, out of an off-cut he was going to throw away. I walked in off the street looking, by his account, like someone carrying something heavy, and he wanted me to leave with something I could actually set down on purpose instead.” I watched his thumb keep moving over the crack, slow, careful.
“That line is where the wood broke while he was cutting it. He didn’t throw it away. He filled it with something darker, something that doesn’t pretend to match, and now it’s the part people like touching best.”
Fenrir was quiet a long moment, looking at the box, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone rough again, differently this time.
“He told me to give it to you when I was ready,” I continued.
“Not before. I think I’m ready now. I think the crack’s not a reason to throw the last month away, even with everything in it that genuinely hurt. I think it might just be the part of our story that ends up being the truest, once we’ve actually finished building the rest of it.”
“Clancy.” He said my name like it had become the only word steady enough to hold what he was feeling.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been given anything that’s meant this much.”
“It’s a box, Fenrir.”
“It’s not a box,” he said, laughing, wet-eyed, pulling me back against him.
“It’s never just been a box, not once, in this entire ridiculous month. Nothing has.”
We stayed out on that terrace a long time, longer than either of us probably should have, given the party still going on without us inside, given Wren and Beck no doubt wondering where we’d disappeared to, given Iris’s careful PR plan still needing both of us back inside it eventually to actually close the deal we’d spent a month chasing.
None of it felt urgent.
For the first time since this whole impossible story had started — a fake lead, a buried box, a wolf who turned out to be the boy I’d spent eleven years grieving — nothing about the future felt like something I needed to manage, control, or carefully construct in advance.
It just felt like something I got to walk into, slowly, honestly, with someone who already knew the worst and best of me and had chosen, deliberately, painfully, imperfectly, to stay anyway.
I thought, sitting there with his arm around me and a stranger’s small, broken, mended box resting in his lap, about eleven years of believing endings only ever came in two flavors — happy, the kind in the books I’d grown up surrounded by at work, or ruined, the kind I’d quietly assumed was the only realistic option once something cracked badly enough.
Sal had been right.
There was a third kind nobody talked about nearly enough, the kind that got mended in plain sight, dark inlay and all, and ended up sturdier for it than it would have been if it had never broken at all.
“We should probably go back in,” I said eventually, not moving.
“Probably,” he agreed, not moving either.
We stayed another five minutes before either of us actually did.