Page 46 of One Night Flame

“I think you bought five kinds. In addition to what you made from scratch.”

“Six,” I said. “And popsicles.”

She laughed again, and that sound landed somewhere in my chest like a warm stone, grounding me. I didn’t even realize how tightly I’d been wound until she smiled like that—easy, genuine—and I felt something inside me loosen just enough to breathe.

We ate slowly. Talked about nothing for a while. Movies, music, which one of us would die first in a zombie apocalypse. (Me, according to her, because I’d try to rescue a cat.)

Then the food was mostly gone, the sun was starting its slow creep toward the ridgeline, and the quiet settled in.

Not uncomfortable. Not forced. Just still.

Lucy took a sip of her water and tucked her hair behind her ear. She wasn’t looking at me, but I could see her throat move as she swallowed. There was something softer in her posture now. Less armor.

So I asked, gently, “How long have you been doing it on your own?”

She looked over at me then—really looked—and the smile she gave me this time didn’t reach her eyes.

But it didn’t need to. It was enough that she didn’t look away.

She pulled her knees up, arms wrapping around them loosely, her fingers tangling at the edge of the blanket like she needed something to hold on to that wasn’t me.

“It happened fast,” she said, her voice soft but steady. “The summer after graduation. One minute I was picking out dorm bedding, the next I was staring at a stick and wondering how I’d explain it to my parents.”

I didn’t say anything. Just let her talk. Because I could tell she wasn’t looking for comfort—she was offering truth.

“Marcus was my high school boyfriend. Sweet enough,in the way boys are when they’re not tested by anything harder than Friday night lights. We were supposed to break up when college started. That was always the plan, you know? But plans change.”

Her smile was a tired one. The kind you give when the memory’s worn smooth from overuse. “We got married because… well, because people do under those circumstances. Because it felt like the right kind of responsible. And for a while, we convinced ourselves it was. I took online classes when I could, tried to keep up with work, with diapers, with being someone’s mom when I was barely more than a kid myself.”

Her fingers picked at the hem of her jeans. “Marcus tried. I won’t take that from him. But he never really got past the idea that fatherhood had stolen something from him. Like there was this other life he was supposed to have. And eventually he just… left. Liam was two.”

My jaw tightened, but I kept it to myself.

She looked out over the trees, not crying, not even close. Just honest. “I didn’t chase him. I couldn’t afford to. I had a kid to raise and a degree to finish and no time to waste feeling sorry for myself. I finished school, got my teaching license, and when the job opened up here, I took it. Moved to be closer to my grandma.”

She looked back at me then, her eyes a little more guarded, like she expected me to flinch.

But I didn’t. Because what she said didn’t scare me. It floored me.

The grit of it. The reality. The way she didn’t paint herself as a victim or a martyr—just someone who had gotten dealt a hard hand and played it, anyway.

And won.

I’d thought I understood what tough looked like. I didn’t—not until I heard her tell it with zero self-pity. Just fact. Juststrength so baked into her bones she didn’t even hear it anymore.

I reached out and covered her hand with mine, gentle. Steady.

She didn’t pull away, turning her fingers to curl with mine instead.

And that felt like the biggest yes I’d ever gotten.

She’d just finished telling me the kind of story that could make a man sit up straighter—pregnant at eighteen, marriage that didn’t hold, a baby she never once apologized for. And the way she told it? No bitterness. No dramatics. Just facts, wrapped in quiet strength. Like she’d had to get good at not needing pity.

I was still holding her hand. Still trying to piece together how someone could live through all that and still look at the world with eyes that soft.

She turned her head and looked at me, not guarded exactly, but bracing for something. “You looked like you’d been hit in the face with a shovel after you found out. About Liam.”

I swallowed. Because that? That was true.

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