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A slow smile spreads over his face. “I have a meeting next week, then I need to get back on the ice to train.”

I narrow my eyes with confusion. “Who is your meeting with?”

“The farm team for the NHL. I called them as soon as I got home, and they said they would let me try out. It’s time to get my life back.” He never ceases to amaze me, and that doesn’t surprise me at all. “And when you’re ready, London, I want you to tell your story, but I want you to tell it your way.”

I grip the leather-bound journal, the pages of which contain my story.

The story that’s already written.

Epilogue

Micah

A Year Later

Mornings are my favorite.

Fresh, crisp air, renewed energy, and the fact I can now sleep at night makes daytime much more sufferable. For the first time in my life, I’m at peace, and I’m lucky enough to wake up to the girl who was my literal dream for three months while I was in isolation. This girl who chooses to be with me every day despite every reason she shouldn’t.

At the earliest hint of dawn, I wake up, brush a kiss over her ivory cheek, and slip out of bed. I head to my woodshop out back, suppressing the terror that I will blink and she’ll be gone. I spent three months alone fighting my demons, and for at least a month of that time, I acted like she was with me. I spoke to her, and she answered. I cradled her and held her. In my mind, everything was as it should be.

It was heaven.

She was so real. It felt like I had slipped into an alternate reality where I had my happy ending with her and she never escaped my attempt at binding her.

Then, one day, after a long sleep, I woke up, reaching my hand out for her, and she wasn’t there. Instead, I found my hand rested on the blood stain that still marred the spot where she tore through the skin on her hand. Reality smacked me in the face like an icy punch. That’s when I knew I had to go home. I fought like hell after that to get my mind right. My existence took on a primitive form, spending weeks like a savage, ruthlessly hunting and obliterating everything within sight. I rage-hunted all the darkness out of me until it was… gone.

Now, every day, I fight to maintain control so I can help London find her light again.

The truth is that I wake up every day petrified that I’ll turn back into that, and the morning solitude is what brings me back from the brink.

After a couple of hours in the wood shack and completing my morning run, I shower, dry myself off with a towel, and slip back into bed, where my sleeping beauty is still passed out.

My wife is not a morning person, despite the fresh rays of sunlight shining over her eyes, which are escaping through the tangled layer of trees and the enormous window in our bedroom. A familiarity that triggers torturous memories and blissful reminders of the place that started it all.

She’s squinting her eyes, and she’s curled up beside me, her arms and legs tucked into her body like a turtle, grasping her precious wolf blanket. She sleeps this way every night—careful, afraid, and exactly how I once left her.

She sleeps like that because memories still plague her. Nightmares of me…

I watch her silently while she sleeps. It’s creepy as fuck, but I love the way she twitches her nose and grimaces in the cutest way. She also wore the sexiest fucking lace I had ever seen to bed last night, which is usually a signal she wants me close by when she wakes. Her skin is smooth and delicate, and the old me would have thought she was begging to be fucked with her ass in the air.

That was the old me, and London deserves better than the old me. So I lie and wait patiently for permission to ravish her.

I try not to wake her because she only sleeps in the morning; she usually stays up all night writing. This way, I can watch over her and wake her if the demons start to overwhelm her. The physical bruises on her body are long healed—mostly—and every day, I work tirelessly to heal her emotional scars.

While she won’t admit it, she does the same for me at night when the story of what happened to us pours out of her. She handwrites in her journals. Pages of words she won’t let me read, the story—our story—from her perspective.

After a few minutes, my hand falls to her cheek to gently wake her. Her eyes fly open in a startle, her initial panic giving way to immense relief when she catches sight of me.

I cup her chin as she scans my face. “I’m real, baby. This isn’t a dream. You’re at home.” Sometimes, I have to remind her where we are. Reality still hasn’t set in for her—that we’re together. Even a year after our small wedding, I haven’t left her side once. Even with my hockey schedule, she’s always with me, facing plane ride after plane ride so she can be with me.

Her cherry lips part, and she closes her eyes with a smile that radiates out of her body.

She keeps her cheek planted on the silk pillow. “Micah, what time is it?”

I press my lips to hers, the heat from the sunlight warming her face. “Eleven,” I murmur against her.

She stirs a bit more as I move my mouth to her earlobe and, ever so slightly, wipe the bit of drool dripping from the corner of her lips.