“Anyway, I just… I don’t know, grew stubborn. The unhappier I was, the more I missed Mom, and it just spiraled into my being really focused on not letting you guys get it. The rest, as they say, is history.”
He reached for my hand, and as he’d started to do since the shooting, when he was careful not to jostle me too much, pressed a kiss to my knuckles.
“Hardly history. We’re still very much in the present.”
I breathed out with the joy that made me feel, and yeah, it was weird to feel joy when I remembered how miserable I’d been back then, and when I thought about the ragged shit that had been storming through my mind today.
He squeezed my fingers before tucking back into his meal. After a few moments, though, he asked, “You haven’t mentioned Jenny in a while.”
I shrugged. “She’s been busy.”
“Too busy to call?” He cocked a brow at that. “It wasn’t like she could visit.”
“No. Not too busy to call,” I defended. “We talk every few days. She works hard, Finn. She has two full time jobs.”
“She does?”
“Yeah. She’s trying to put herself through night school.”
“To do what?”
“She wants to be a CPA,” I told him, curious about what his response would be to that.
He hummed. “Good money to be had there.”
I’d almost expected him to say something sexist. That was the response Jenny usually received when she shared her course details with a guy. They either said she was too pretty to be an accountant—because, yeah, no accountants were hot, right? Men were such dicks sometimes—or she got shit for not being able to go out during the evenings. Like her time belonged to them.
Jenny’s life revolved around work, school, and her mandu jour. When work had included me, that meant we’d spent a lot of time together. I wasn’t offended that she was too busy to catch up every day.
She had shit she needed to do, and when I got my bakery up and running and could offer her a job again, things would roll back around.
“Jenny hopes so. She doesn’t want to stay in the city.”
He cocked a brow. “No? Why not?”
“She just doesn’t.” That was her secret to share, not mine. “Not everyone wants to stay in the city forever.”
He quirked a brow. “Since when?”
I grinned at him. “You want to be born, live, and buried here, huh? Well, there goes my dream of being a snowbird.”
“Sam wants to go to Florida when he retires.”
“When?”
“We don’t all live and die on the streets, Aoife,” he chided.
“If you die on the streets, I’ll make you rue the day you were born. I don’t intend on losing you now that I’ve found you.”
He grinned at me, looking far too pleased with himself as he purred, “Good to know.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “And they say romance is dead.”