Chapter 40: (END)

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Recovery was slow. The hand took eight weeks in a cast and another six in physical therapy. The liver wound healed faster but left a scar that pulled when he twisted, a permanent reminder that ran four inches along his right side and turned white in cold weather.

Grant went back to work after a month, against the surgeon’s advice, because the company needed him and because sitting alone in the villa with nothing to do except think was a form of punishment he could no longer tolerate. He worked mornings. He spent afternoons on video calls with Nell.

She called every day at four o’clock, Carrow time. The calls lasted anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, depending on whether Nell had news. She usually had news. Mr. Hops had been joined by a second rabbit named Dr. Whiskers. Mrs. Owens had switched from pencil earrings to tiny book earrings. The girl who shared her crackers had become her best friend, and her name was Lila, and Lila had a dog named Soup.

Grant listened to all of it. He asked follow-up questions. He remembered the names—Lila, Soup, Dr. Whiskers, Mrs. Owens—and asked about them by name in subsequent calls, and Nell noticed, and the noticing mattered more than he would ever know.

“Daddy, I’ve already kept another man away from Mommy.” She reported this one afternoon with the satisfied air of a secret agent completing a mission. “Manager Beckett asked her for coffee and I told him she was busy.”

“Nell, you’re a genius.”

𝗥𝖾аd 𝗈ո 𝗮ոу 𝗱𝘦𝘃𝘪се 𝘰𝘯 gа𝗹𝗇𝘰v𝖾𝗅𝘴.𝖼𝗼𝘮

“I know. You have to work harder, though. I can’t do everything.”

“I’m coming to Carrow next week. For work.”

“Really?” Her face filled the screen, all eyes. “What do you want to bring me?”

“What do you want?”

“Just you, Daddy.”

Grant closed the laptop and sat at his desk for a while. His throat was tight. He pressed his thumb against his side, where the scar was, and felt the pull.

In Carrow, Darcy passed by Nell’s bedroom door and heard the tail end of the conversation. She stood in the hallway and listened to her daughter say just you, Daddy, and something shifted in her chest that she’d been holding in place for a long time.

She didn’t examine it. She went to the kitchen and made tea.

The day Grant arrived, Darcy didn’t know.

She picked Nell up from school and drove home through the usual traffic, thinking about the presentation she had due Friday and the leak in the bathroom faucet she kept forgetting to call someone about. Nell chattered from the backseat about Lila’s dog and a science project involving baking soda volcanoes.

Darcy unlocked the apartment door and stopped.

The living room was full of balloons. Not the professional balloon arches of the conference or the expensive hotel decorations—these were regular balloons, the kind you buy at a corner store, inflated by mouth, tied with curling ribbon in mismatched colors. Some were lopsided. Some had already started to drift toward the floor. Each one had a small card attached: “Darcy, I love you.” The handwriting was Grant’s—she recognized the sharp angles, the impatient t-crossings.

Flowers on the kitchen counter. More gift boxes than the small apartment could comfortably hold. And on the sofa, propped against a cushion, a stuffed bear. Not a giant one. A medium one, brown, with a lopsided bow.

She picked it up. It was the same size as Mr. Buttons. Same bow. Different bear—newer, the fur still soft, the eyes still bright. A replacement, or a companion. She wasn’t sure which.

Grant came out of the kitchen wearing the floral apron.

He’d brought it from the villa. The grease stain was still on the pocket. He carried two plates and set them on the table with the careful concentration of someone who has practiced this exact sequence of movements multiple times and is still not confident.

“You’re back. Wash your hands and eat.”

“Daddy! Good job!” Nell gave him a thumbs-up and pulled Darcy inside by the hand. “I told him what to cook, Mommy. I told him everything you like.”

Darcy looked at the table. No fish soup. No seafood of any kind. Instead: sweet and sour pork (her favorite since college), stir-fried greens with garlic (Nell’s intelligence, she guessed), and a tomato egg soup that she’d made for herself a hundred times but had never once made for anyone else. It was the kind of meal that required knowing someone, not impressing them.

“How did you—”

“Nell helped.” Grant scratched the back of his head. The gesture was so unlike the Grant she’d married that she almost didn’t recognize it—sheepish, uncertain, a man standing in someone else’s kitchen hoping he hadn’t overstepped. “I came uninvited. I hope that’s okay.”

Darcy looked at Nell, who was vibrating with poorly concealed conspiracy.

“It’s fine. This kind of romance is for young people, though. I don’t need it.”

“Who says! Mommy, you’re young too!” Nell pushed her toward the table.

They sat. Darcy and Nell on one side, Grant across from them. He pushed the dishes closer to Darcy. “These are all your favorites. Nell verified.”

“Verified is a big word.”

“She taught it to me.” Grant smiled. Nell nodded solemnly.

They ate. It was good. Not perfect—the pork was slightly overcooked, the greens were undersalted—but it was good, and it was correct, and Darcy ate every bite while Grant watched her with an expression that was trying so hard not to be hopeful that it became, against her will, endearing.

Under the table, Nell kicked Grant’s shin.

He winced. Looked at her. She widened her eyes and made a tiny gesture with her head: now.

Grant put down his chopsticks. Stood up. Walked around the table to Darcy’s side and stood there, awkward and oversized in the small apartment kitchen, and said what he’d come to say.

“Darcy, I love you. I know that’s not enough. I know you can’t just put the past behind you because I show up with balloons and cook dinner.” He paused. “I’m not asking you to forgive me right now. I’m asking you to let me stay close. To take care of you and Nell. To keep trying, for as long as it takes.”

He didn’t kneel. He stood there, feet planted, hands at his sides—one still scarred and stiff from the stone—and waited.

Nell looked at Darcy. Her lips were pressed together, her eyes wide, her whole body tilted toward her mother with the barely contained urgency of someone watching the final seconds of a very close game.

“Mommy…”

Darcy set down her chopsticks. She looked at Grant for a long time—at the scar she knew was under his shirt, at the hand he’d broken to save them, at the man who’d spent five years treating her as invisible and one year trying to become visible again.

She reached up and straightened his collar, which was crooked.

“Grant, I believe you’ll be a good father.”

“And as for being a good husband—” She smoothed the fabric down. Her fingers lingered a moment longer than necessary. “We’ll see.”

It wasn’t yes. It wasn’t a door thrown open. It was a door unlocked—the deadbolt turned, the chain still on, the light from inside falling in a thin stripe across the threshold.

Grant’s breath caught. “You’ll give me a chance?”

“I said we’ll see. That’s different from a chance.” But the corner of her mouth moved, and Nell saw it, and Grant saw it, and they both knew.

“I’ll take it.”

“You’d better.”

Nell looked between them. Then she picked up her chopsticks and resumed eating, loudly and deliberately, as if to give them privacy by filling the room with the sounds of a seven-year-old who has, for the first time in her life, both parents at the dinner table.

Outside the apartment window, the landlord’s plants dripped their six o’clock water past the kitchen glass, and Nell had been right all along: it did sound like a waterfall.

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The end.

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Message from Noa: Have a great friday dear readers, in a few hours we will have two new novels, hope you like them. God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (─‿‿O)

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