“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t want to scare you. I just couldn’t leave you like that.”
“I know. I couldn’t have left you either, and it’s not because I’m a Marshal. It’s just because I’m me and you’re you.”
He finished off the drink and she got up without saying anything else to pour him another one.
“There were three people in that room who made the problem we were dealing with, and the one I blame least is the kid. He’s a kid, what does he know?”
“You and Jillian are going to get along just fine,” Tiffani said wryly, thinking of all Jillian’s stray teenagers at the community center.
“But by the time Jamie pointed that gun at Bruce, I could have pulled the trigger right along with him. I don’t care how awful McMillan was to work with, Bruce Tompoulidis treated everyone else in his life like they were just there for him to toy with. You. Jamie. Florence and the rest of the Historical Society.”
Tiffani nodded. “He didn’t like McMillan acting like he was beneath him, but that’s how he acted with everyone else.”
She laced their fingers together.
“But you didn’t pull the trigger,” Tiffani said. “You jumped in front of the gun. You got everyone out alive and okay, no matter how much you hated them right then.”
He smiled. “That is something, I guess.”
Once, she knew, she would have said that she understood Bruce. He was like Gor
don.
But it was like remembering the time she had fallen while playing soccer as a kid. She’d landed with her bare knee on a rock. She remembered the pain, sure. In the right light, she could even still see the scar. But it was no longer real to her.
It was a memory, and it was one that would mean less and less to her as the years went by.
It hadn’t been the consolation Martin had needed, so it hadn’t been what she had first thought.
“I don’t know if you know how much better you’ve made my life,” Tiffani said. “I don’t even know if I can explain it to you. But it’s like I was stuck on a treadmill in a tunnel, working really hard to get to the light at the end, doing everything I could... but staying in the same place. Then you gave me your hand and took me out for real.”
He shook his head. “You would have gotten through that tunnel on your own, Tiffani.”
“Maybe. But I like the speed of traveling with you. And the company.”
He cupped her cheek with his hand. “I’d like to travel with you for the rest of my life.”
“I’d like that too,” Tiffani said.
She leaned forward to kiss him.
It wasn’t the tingle of whiskey on his lips or even her own that threatened to get her drunk: it was just the knowledge that, as he’d said, they were who they were.
As implausible—as impossible—as it had first seemed to her, they did belong together.
In her forties, long after she’d stopped hoping for this kind of thing, she had finally had the whirlwind romance she had once dreamed of, in all its awkward glory.
She’d had sex that bumped up against steering wheels, she’d stolen away at noon for the sake of passion, and she’d taken a midnight ride through the stars.
And now this—her in her bathrobe and him in the pair of pajama pants he’d left at her place last night—both of them exhausted. All the ups and downs of life.
They could travel through them together.
Epilogue: Tiffani
They went, at long last, to Italy.
They had been in Rome for four days now and Tiffani still hadn’t stopped feeling like she was in the middle of some exceptionally vivid dream. Even the colors seemed richer than they were back home: the red of the tomatoes, the white of the mozzarella, the pale green of the pistachio gelato.