Page 94 of Your Place or Mine

Hope.

And maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

My heart hadn’t settled since Riley said the wordwife.

Not ex. Not girlfriend. Wife, in every way that counted.

I was still holding my untouched drink. Riley had curled her feet up beneath her, legs crossed on the cushion, like she’d settled in for something she knew I wasn’t prepared for.

I wasn’t.

Not even close.

I stared into the mug and tried to reconcile the man I’d been kissing in my imagination with the man who had once watched someone he loved waste away right in front of him.

My chest tightened.

“His wife…” I repeated softly, still struggling with the word. “God, Riley.”

“I know,” she said, voice gentle. “And I wasn’t trying to drop a bomb. I just thought… if anyone deserves the whole picture, it’s you.”

I nodded slowly.

But it was hard to breathe through it.

I remembered the way Callum looked at me when I talked about my mom. How still he got. How his gaze locked on mine like he understood something deeper than he could say out loud.

Of course he did.

Grief recognized grief.

And maybe that was the terrifying thing…that we were more alike than I realized.

“He’s not easy,” I murmured.

“Nope,” Riley agreed. “Never has been. He’s stubborn and reactive and a royal pain in the ass when he wants to be.”

“And still…” I trailed off.

“And still,” she echoed.

There wasn’t a word for the pull I felt toward him. It wasn’t logic. It wasn’t lust. Though,let’s be honest, that was definitely part of it. It was something raw and reluctant. Like finding a locked door with a light under it and knowing, without ever opening it, that what was on the other side could change everything.

I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.

“I didn’t know,” I said quietly. “I mean… I knew something had shaped him. You can’t be that closed off unless you’ve lost something important. But I didn’t know it wasall of that.”

“It was Lucy,” Riley said, her voice softening, “and then his dad. Back to back.”

I blinked. “What?”

Riley nodded. “His dad got sick about six months after Lucy passed. Not the same thing…heart failure, I think. But it was too much at once. Callum was already carrying the weight of watching Lucy fade, and then to lose the man who basically raised him to be who he is? It gutted him.”

I swallowed, hard. “How do you come back from that?”

Riley smiled sadly. “You don’t. Not fully. But you rebuild. Slowly. Quietly. With your hands and your work. That’s what he did with the Rusty Stag.”

I let out a slow breath and sat back against the couch.

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