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She presses her head to my shoulder. “I don’t want that, either. So what do we do?”

“Maybe . . . maybe we take it slow, take our time. We were thrown into a whirlwind of a deal with the competition, and everything was intensified. I’m not saying I’m sorry about any of that. I’m not. I wouldn’t have met you or fallen in love with you in any other way.”

“So you’re saying you don’t regret the past.”

I laugh.

“What?” she asks, bristling.

“Cristina, if there is anything I don’t regret, it’s meeting and falling in love with you. You’re the one thing out of everything else that’s made the most sense, and I wouldn’t take back one second I spent with you.”

“Me neither.”

“Here. I’ve got something for you.” I slowly pull the object from my pocket. “This is another reason why I was late. I wanted to give this to you—if I saw you, that is.”

She takes the small bundle and slowly unwraps it. Her eyes flick up to mine. They hold exactly what I expected—surprise, disbelief.

Cristina lifts the Bitty Being so we can both see, turning it from side to side. Jagged golden lines fill every place where there was a crack, so that now it isn’t simply a Bitty Being—it’s a Bitty Being held together with gold.

“It’s called kintsugi,” I explain. “It’s the Japanese art of fixing broken things with gold. They believe that fixing something this way makes it more beautiful. I think so, too.”

She clutches the Bitty Being to her chest. Her eyes fill with tears. Through a sob she says, “Thank you. Thank you so much. She’s even more beautiful now than she was when the magic fixed her.”

I tuck a strand of hair behind Cristina’s ear. “She was always beautiful, the cracks and all. You just couldn’t see it before.”

“Thank you.” She throws her arms around me, and we hug. I pull her tight, holding her like she’s the most precious thing in the world to me, because she is.

She always has been, and I get the feeling she always will be.

We stay like that for a moment, and then she pulls back, wiping tears from her eyes. “This is the best gift I’ve ever received, and now I feel bad because I don’t have something for you.”

“Don’t feel bad.” I pull her into a side hug. “You couldn’t have known Rowe would be giving birth today, we’d run into each other, and all this would happen.”

She pulls back slightly and looks up at me with her eyes shining from fresh tears. “What is happening?”

My heart convulses for a second, but not from fear. From something else, something I can definitely identify now as love.

“Well, I suppose what’s happening is that you and I are figuring things out.”

She nods. “Okay.”

I kiss the top of her head and pull her back into my side. “If you feel really badly about not having a gift for me in your pocket, I know of a way you can make it up.”

“How’s that?” she asks, sniffling.

“It just so happens the last challenge is happening tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” she repeats, as if she needs time for this to sink in.

“That’s right, and I also happen to know that even though we withdrew from the competition, Mina wouldn’t have any problem letting us back in.”

A sly smile curls her lips. “You don’t say.”

“I do say. So, if you were so inclined, would you maybe consider joining me for one last challenge, see if we can win this thing?”

She eyes the Bitty Being, then me, and my heart’s beating a mile a minute. Will she say no? She might, and I’d understand if she did, given her asthma attack happened during the last challenge.

But then Cristina turns to me and smiles. “I thought you’d never ask.”