Page 65 of Second Chance with the Half-Elf
I climb down, boots hitting the planks harder than I mean to.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I answer.
There’s a beat where neither of us moves.
“You’re really doing it,” I say finally. “Staying.”
She nods. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
“What changed?”
Her jaw tightens like she doesn’t want to say it. But she does anyway.
“I got tired of running from things that matter.”
My fingers curl around the edge of the ladder, grounding me. “That include me?”
She looks up at me, and there’s no armor in it. No dodge. Just this raw, messy truth she lays down like a card on the table.
“Yeah,” she says. “It does.”
The wind picks up, tugging at the lights strung overhead. The paper lanterns flutter like breath.
“I don’t expect it to be easy,” she adds. “I’m still figuring things out. Who I am here. With you.”
“I don’t want easy,” I tell her. “I want honest.”
She exhales, shaky. “That’s scarier.”
“I know.”
She steps closer, until there’s barely a foot between us.
“I thought staying meant giving something up,” she says. “Freedom, maybe. Or control. But it’s not that. It’s choosing to stay. Even when it hurts. Especially then.”
I nod slowly. “That’s the kind of staying that matters.”
We’re quiet again.
But it’s the kind of quiet that feels full. Like something’s finally settled in the right place.
Her eyes flick up to the lights overhead. “They’re crooked.”
“They’re not,” I grumble.
“They are.”
“You’re just standing at the wrong angle.”
She smiles. That sharp, sideways grin that used to wreck me when I was twenty and hasn’t lost any of its power.
Then her voice softens.
“You still gonna fight for me?” she asks. “Even now?”
I step closer. My hand brushes her wrist, slow and deliberate, like a question.
