“I’m sorry I lost sight of that,” I whisper. “Of us. You’ve always been enough for me. Always.”
He looks at me like he’s missed my dreams as much as he’s missed me. “I love you, Quinn.”
“I love you, too.”
He presses his lips to my forehead, then my nose. I kiss him on the chin and we lie snuggled together.
At least until the moment is ruined by the growl from my stomach.
“Does your sister have anything to eat around here?” Graham pulls me out of the bed and we quietly make our way to the kitchen. It’s not even eight in the morning yet and Ava and Reid are still asleep. Graham and I scour the kitchen for all the food we need to make pancakes and eggs. He turns on the stove and I’m mixing the batter when I notice the wooden box he made me still sitting at the end of the counter.
I put down the mixer and walk over to the box. I run my hand over it, wondering if things would be different today had he not made this gift for us to close on our wedding night. I still remember writing him the love letter. I also remember slipping the nude pic inside the envelope. I wonder how different I look now than when I snapped that picture.
I open the box to pull out his letter, but when I pick it up, I notice a few scraps of paper at the bottom of the box. One of them is the yellow Post-it note I left stuck to my wall for six months. The other two are our fortunes.
I pick them up and read them. “I can’t believe you kept these all this time. It’s so cute.”
Graham walks over to me. “Cute?” He pulls one of the fortunes out of my hands. “This isn’t cute. It’s proof that fate exists.”
I shake my head and point to his fortune. “Your fortune says you would succeed in a business endeavor that day, but you didn’t even go to work. How is that proof that we’re soul mates?”
His lips curl up into a grin. “If I had been at work I never would have met you, Quinn. I’d say that’s the biggest work-related success I’ve ever had.”
I tilt my head, wondering why I never thought of his fortune from that point-of-view.
“Also . . . there’s this.” Graham flips his fortune over and holds it up, pointing at the number eight on the back.
I look down and also read the number on the back of mine. An eight.
Two number eights. The date we reconnected all those years ago.
“You lied to me,” I say, looking back up at him. “You said you were kidding about these having eights on the back.”
Graham takes the fortune out of my hand and carefully places both of them back in the box. “I didn’t want you to fall in love with me because of fate,” he says, closing the box. “I wanted you to fall in love with me simply because you couldn’t help yourself.”
I smile as I stare up at him with appreciation. I love that he’s sentimental. I love that he believes in fate more than he believes in coincidences. I love that he believes I’m his fate.
I stand on the tips of my toes and kiss him. He grabs the back of my head with both hands and returns my kiss with just as much appreciation.
After several moments of kissing and a couple of failed efforts at stopping, he mutters something about the pancakes burning and forces himself away from me as he steps to the stove. I bring my fingers to my lips and smile when I realize he just kissed me and I had absolutely no desire to pull away from him. In fact, I wanted the kiss to last even longer than it did. It’s a feeling I wasn’t sure I would be capable of again.
I debate pulling him back to me because I really want to kiss him again. But I also really want pancakes, so I let him resume cooking. I turn toward the wooden box and reach for the letter I wrote to him. Now that I feel like we’re on a path to recovery, it makes me want to read the words I wrote to him when we were first starting this journey together. I flip over the envelope to pull out the letter, but the envelope is still sealed. “Graham?” I turn back around. “You didn’t read yours?”
Graham glances over his shoulder and smiles at me. “I didn’t need to, Quinn. I’ll read it on our twenty-fifth anniversary.” He faces the stove and resumes cooking like he didn’t just say something that feels more healing than anything he’s ever said or done.
I look back down at the letter with a smile on my face. Even with the temptation of nude pictures, he was secure enough in his love for me that he didn’t need any reassurance from reading this letter.
I suddenly want to write him another letter to go along with this one. In fact, I might even start doing what he’s been doing all these years and add more letters to the box. I want to write him so many letters that when we finally reopen this box for the right reasons, he’ll have enough letters to read for a week.