He came back, sat beside her again. “I’m here,” he said as he took her hand firmly in his. “This is real.”

“Flynn.” She steadied herself by staring at their joined hands. “All my life I’ve wanted certain things. I wanted to paint. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an artist. A wonderful artist. I studied, and I worked. And I never came close. I don’t have the gift.”

She closed her eyes. “It hurt, more than I can tell you, to accept that.” Steadier, she let out a breath, looked at him. “The best I could do was work with art, to be around it, to find some purpose for this love.” She fisted a hand on her heart. “And that I was good at.”

“Don’t you think there’s something noble about doing what we’re really good at, even if it wasn’t our first choice?”

“That’s a nice thought. But it’s hard to set a dream aside. I guess you know that.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“The other thing I wanted was to love someone, to be loved by him. Absolutely. To know when I went to bed at night, woke in the morning, that this someone was with me. Understood me and wanted me. I never had much luck with that one either. I might meet someone, and we’d seem to click. But it never got inside me. I never felt that leap, or the burn that eases into that wonderful, spreading warmth. When you just know this is the one you were waiting for. Until you. Don’t say anything,” she said quickly. “I need to finish.”

She picked up the water again, soothed her throat. “When you wait all your life for something and then you find it, it’s like a miracle. All the parts inside you that’ve been on hold, they open up and start beating. You were okay before, you were good. You had purpose and direction, and everything was just fine. But now it’s more. You can’t explain what that more is, but you know, if you lose it, you’ll never be able to fill those empty spaces in just the same way again. Not ever. That’s terrifying. I’m afraid that what’s inside me is just a trick. That I’ll wake up tomorrow and what’s beating in here will have stopped. It’ll be quiet again. I won’t feel this way. I won’t feel the way I’ve waited all my life to feel.”

Her eyes were dry again, her hand steady as she set the water down. “I can stand you not loving me back. There’s always the hope that you will. But I don’t know if I can stand not loving you. It would be like . . . like having something stolen from inside me. I don’t know if I can handle going back to the way I was.”

He brushed a hand down her hair, then drew her close to his side so her head rested on his shoulder. “Nobody’s ever loved me, not the way you’re talking about. I don’t know what to do about it, Malory, but I don’t want to lose it either.”