Slowly. Softly. Without hurry or urgency or demand, Max's hand moved to her face, his lips finding hers with the quiet certainty of someone returning to something that has always been theirs, pouring into it everything he had been holding for three years without making it a weight she had to carry.
Just a kiss. Just the simplest and most complete possible statement of the thing that had kept him going through every dark night of three years.
You are mine, and I am yours, and I have never stopped. He stopped. He pulled back. Just far enough to see her face.
Ruby stood in the hallway of the house where they had lived after their wedding, her hand still in his, her ring on her finger, her feet bare on the marble floor, the stopped music still somehow present in the air around them.
She looked stunned.
Not unhappy. Not frightened.
