Nothing can touch us here. No one can take this away from us.

We eat until we can’t eat any more, and Whitney and I sink into one of the plush cushions on a large round chair by the pool. Cricket and Hunter laze across from us, side by side and holding hands. We probably all look like the most disgusting pictures of happiness.

Fucking finally.

“We need some music,” Cricket says, pulling out her phone. She taps the screen a couple of times, and the first sound to come out of it has Whitney curling away from me.

It takes me a few seconds to realize that the voice is Ricky Rango’s. But the words are Whitney’s.

“Shit. Sorry.”

“No, don’t change it,” I say.

Whitney looks at me funny. “Why not? We don’t need him here. He’ll just ruin everything.”

I shake my head. “No, he won’t. Because he doesn’t have that power anymore. Besides, he didn’t write those words. You did. It might be his voice, but this is your heart.”

“I never thought about it like that,” Whitney whispers. It takes a moment before she relaxes into me, but when she does, her spine unbends and she starts to hum along with it.

“I wrote this song thinking about you,” she says when it ends, and the words I just heard hit home even harder.

“I’m so sorry I put you in the position where he had even a sliver of a chance with you. I hate that I gave Renee the opening she needed to threaten you. I’m so sorry, Whitney. You’ll never know how sorry.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t be sorry. It might not have been the road I wanted to travel, but it led me right back here to you. This is where I was meant to be, and I appreciate every single bit of it more now than I ever could have before. This is real. This is perfect.”

“This is us,” I tell her quietly.

The song changes to something else, and we spend the afternoon exactly the way it was meant to be spent.

Together.

Thirty-Nine

Whitney

By the time dinner rolls around, Cricket has the mad urge to have a bonfire on the beach, and Lincoln indulges her.

Once the flames crackle in the firepit, we roast hot dogs and I laugh as Lincoln tries to figure out how to get his off the stick and into the bun.

“You’ve never done this before, have you?”

He shakes his head. “No, but clearly I’ve been missing out.”

As we eat half-charred dogs with too much ketchup, I sip wine out of a plastic tumbler and stare up at the stars.

Cricket and Hunter sit across the fire from us, and it makes me so happy to see them just like they were before Karma dropped her bomb on all of us. She can’t break them. Just like nothing can break Lincoln and me. I truly believe that now. Our relationship has been forged in the fires of adversity, and we’ve emerged as something different. Something beautiful in a way that we never could have been before.