Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Morning brings croissants and a photo from Riggs of Vanessa asleep in a first-class seat, mouth open, a scarf cocooned like a hurricane in nap form. I’m doomed, he captions. Then, after a beat: She snores cute. Do not tell anyone I said that.
I show Cam. She smirks and sends back: Proud of you, Beard-Mountain. He replies with a middle-finger emoji and a location pin from the tarmac.
Dean pings the group with Keep heads on a swivel. Orange Team is a call away. Rae adds Try the lemon bars at the Charleston stop. Worth a detour. The feed scrolls with logistics and jokes and the kind of shorthand you only get after bleeding together and making it out.
I step onto the veranda with coffee and watch the sky make up its mind. Cam slips under my arm, chin on my shoulder. Down on the street, a school bus sighs; up the block, a runner huffs past; inside, Edgar sings to himself as he polishes a bowl like it’s a trophy.
“We did it,” she says, not as a surprise but as a record for our own archive. “We made it through the part where stories try to make themselves out of us.”
“We wrote our own instead,” I say.
She nods, tips my face toward hers, and kisses me like a chapter end and a chapter start share a line. It’s simple. It’s everything.
Later we’ll go to the mural and touch up a corner the rain tried to eat. Later I’ll teach a BRAVO workshop to a bunch of rookies about what to do when the threat isn’t just a person but a narrative. Later we’ll pick up a leash and meet a shepherd mix at the shelter who will absolutely own this house in two days.
For now we stand, and breathe, and let the world do what it does while we keep doing what we promised—hold the line, draw the way through, make it loud with love and quiet with trust.
Down the coast, a monolith and a hurricane are learning orbit. Here, under wisteria and a sky that finally trusts us, my wife slips her hand into mine and squeezes once—steady, coded, always—and my whole body answers back.
Always.