Scooping up the shirt, she cuddled it in her lap. “I already got the bus ticket.” She winced. Lying outright left a sour taste in her mouth. “But we’ll get together first thing when I’m back. I promise.”

“Look, I’ll have to work round the clock to make up for the time I’ve been away. I was counting on seeing you Saturday.”

His voice was so very far away. She drew her knees to her chin. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know you were coming home.”

His huffed sigh crackled through the speaker. “I guess your surprise has to wait.”

“Another surprise?”

Laughter swelled in the background. The sound over the phone muted, and his voice came through muffled and indistinct. Then the line cleared.

“Listen, sweetheart, I have to run to a dinner meeting. One way or another, I can’t wait to see you.”

She softened her voice. “Me, too.” Switching off the end table light, she cringed. Was she lying now, too?

He took a quick breath.

The signal from thousands of miles away bounced off a satellite, streaming into her ear in a nanosecond. She could almost feel the cool vacuum of his inhalation against her sleep-sweaty cheek.

“I love you, Tessa.”

The miles between them compressed to a point of infinite density. The phone became a thousand-pound weight in her hand. She bobbled it, caught it again, and brought it back to her lips. “Richard, I…” In the background, insistent voices called his name.

“Gotta go. Bye, sweetheart.”

The line went dead.

The phone clunked on the floor, and she collapsed onto her back, tucking the shirt under her chin.

Richard said the “l” word.

She tickled her lips across flannel and inhaled deeply the scent of sawdust.

Again.

Now what? If he said it a third time, she’d have no choice but to respond.

As she surrendered to sleep, a memory shimmered through her final fragment of consciousness—a sensation, really, more felt than thought or seen—the back of Jonas’s hand brushing a soft caress over her cheekbone. So quick and so light it might not have happened at all but for the searing recollection of his gently rasping knuckles.

And in that instant, her exhausted brain fired off a thought in response—a miraculous alchemy of chemistry, electricity, and emotion.

I love you, the synapses spoke…once the thunder finally quieted.

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Two days later, Tessa rubbed her eyes and stared through the tinted bus window. The Hudson River sparkled steel-blue, and the massive city rose before her, gray and glassy in the afternoon light. Sepia and silver buildings sprawled as far as she could see. She put a palm to the window. Downtown Green Ridge would likely fit between two fingers with room to spare. From the end of the world to the middle of it all in no time flat, thanks to the magic of sleep.