When Will left her apartment that night, Mac felt cautiously hopeful that the two of them could make this work. He may not want to talk about their issues, may want to keep his head firmly buried in the sand, but she knew he had heard her, and Will never forgot a thing, especially where Mac was concerned. Sooner or later, they would really talk, and everything would be just fine.

By the next morning, however, Mac's fragile hopes had given way to anxiety. It was so much easier to believe that he wasn't slipping away from her when he was there, warm and solid and in the same room. She was just reaching for her phone, to ask Will if she could come over earlier than they had planned, when it rang in her hand. Mac smiled when she saw Will's name, but it faded almost at once, when he told her he was calling to cancel their dinner plans.

"I'm just feeling under the weather," he said. "I wouldn't be very good company today."

Mac's heart plunged into her stomach. "I could come over and bring you some soup," she offered, somewhat frantically, but Will refused.

"I think I'm just going to lay low this weekend. I'll see you Monday, alright?"

"Feel better," Mac murmured queasily, hanging up with trembling hands. She desperately tried to ignore the voice in the back of her mind, the one that was telling her it was all over.

Last night Will had talked about "the rest of our lives", but in the harsh light of day, rational thought had clearly made him think better of it. You scared him off, Mac berated herself. He didn't even want to talk to you just now, he could hardly get off the phone fast enough. You knew he was perfectly happy pretending nothing ever happened, and you had to go and make him relive it, talking about making things up to him? How stupid are you?

When Monday morning came, Mac had to drag herself unwillingly out of bed. The knowledge that dozens of reporters and editors and crew members were counting on her made it easier, as did the promise of a long day of work to distract her. Clinging to the utterly unrealistic expectation that she would be able to avoid seeing Will alone today, Mac squared her shoulders and strode into the newsroom when the elevator reached the twenty-fifth floor.

Always an early bird, Mac was accustomed to finding herself among the first News Night staff members at work each day, and she welcomed the quiet of the newsroom before the rush got underway. She anticipated having at least a couple hours to work this morning before the others began to bombard her with questions and demands. The last thing that Mac expected was to find that her office was already occupied when she got there.

Will was sitting in the chair across from her desk, hands tightly gripping the armrests, one ankle jiggling restlessly on the opposite knee. Mac started violently when she saw him, her hand flying to her chest. Then she took a closer look.

On the desk before him sat Will's lighter, every ashtray he owned, and a half-empty pack of cigarettes. His face had taken on a slightly greyish tinge, his eyes were red, and the lines around them were more prominent than they had been a few days earlier. The moment Will's eyes locked with hers, he stood and swept all of it into the garbage can beside Mac's desk.

A rush of love and pride and relief surged up inside Mac, and when Will pulled her in for a desperate hug, Mac squeezed him back just as tightly. The hug went on longer than usual, Will's face remaining buried against her neck, inhaling, as if her skin held something that could replace the nicotine his system was craving. Mac let him stay there for as long as he needed, gently stroking his back.

"I didn't say it had to be overnight," Mac chided when Will finally pulled away, a shy smile lingering on her face. He shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets, but no amount of terse behaviour was going to bother her today. "I just wish you had told me," she said, keeping one hand on his arm. "I was worried! Are you feeling alright?"

Will nodded, but his face told a different story, and she spent much of the morning watching him grimace and rub his forehead whenever he thought she wasn't looking. When it was finally time for lunch, Mac steered Will determinedly toward his office. Shutting the door behind them, she turned off the lights and set to work closing the blinds.

"Mac, I'm fine," Will protested weakly, as she eased him into his chair.

"Shut up," she said gently. "Just let me do this for you, okay?"

It was a mark of how much Will's head was pounding that he didn't offer any further argument, merely submitting to her ministrations. Hopping up onto the edge of his desk, Mac took his head in her hands, her fingers slowly massaging his temples and the base of his neck. Will moaned softly, leaning more heavily into her hands, and her heart clenched in her chest.

All too soon, there was a knock on the door, and Mac had just enough time to stand and put a little distance between herself and Will before Sloan entered his office.

"Sorry, you got a second?" the young woman asked. Then she paused, blinking in the darkness. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"Of course not," Mac replied, her voice light and easy. She and Will were not precisely hiding the fact that they had grown closer in recent months, but neither had they gone out of their way to tell anyone just how much closer that really was. As far as anyone knew, they were good friends again, but nothing more, and for now, they were both content to keep it that way.

Mac crossed to Will's bathroom, finding a glass and filling it with water. Sloan eyed her strangely, before turning back to Will and getting to the point. "So, I'm hosting Elliott's show tonight," she told him.

"I know," he replied. "I'm the one who suggested you."

"You really think I can do it?" she asked uncertainly.

"I have no idea," said Will shortly. "So, we're going to find out."

Mac set the glass of water down in front of him, shooting him a glare that Sloan couldn't see. Will grimaced, sipping the water as Mac fished a couple of Advil from her purse and handed them to him. "Thanks," he muttered, and swallowed them without another word.

Sloan watched this exchange with continued interest, before addressing Will once more. "Alright, well, your exuberant confidence notwithstanding, I have the spokesperson from TEPCO, and he just told me off the record that Reactor 3 is causing what is a level seven, not a level five radiation leak. What's the trick to getting him to say it on the record?"

"There's no trick," Will said. "You just don't stop until he tells the truth."

"What do you mean you don't stop?" Sloan persisted.

"I mean you don't stop," Will said impatiently. Mac could almost see a lecture forming on Will's tongue, so she flashed him another look of warning. "Sloan, I watch your show at 4:00, and you're brilliant, but you let guests say things that I know you know aren't true, and then you just move on. Ask the follow-up, and then demonstrate with facts how the guest is lying. That's all it is."

Mac inclined her head slightly, knowing that Will would have liked to say much more than this, and grateful that he had held himself back, if only for her sake.

Sloan nodded slowly, absorbing his words. "Got it," she said. "Thanks. See you later, Kenzie," she added absently, already halfway out the door.

A flicker of irritation involuntarily crossed Mac's face, but she hastened to mask it when she saw Will staring at her, his frown darkening. He opened his mouth to speak, but Mac cut him off, resuming her gentle massage until it was time to get back to work.

After the show that night, Mac packed Will off in his car, with strict instructions to put himself straight to bed, before she headed back upstairs. She still had plenty of notes to go over with the staff, and so she was just getting ready to leave her office, packing up at the end of a long night, when Sloan went rogue.

Mac's head shot up the instant Sloan's tone shifted, her jaw dropping a little more with every moment that passed. It was nothing short of a trainwreck, and by the end, Mac was watching the screen with her face buried in her hands.

After the broadcast, Sloan stumbled back into the newsroom like one shell-shocked, and Mac hung back as Charlie blasted her. When he was gone, Mac tried to catch Sloan's eyes to offer a sympathetic smile, to tell her that they had all been on the wrong side of Charlie Skinner's sharp tongue at one time or another, but Sloan simply swept past her, unseeing.

Mac hoped that it might just blow over, but by the next morning, the problem had snowballed far beyond the reputation of one defiant reporter. It was all anyone in the newsroom was talking about that day, falling conspicuously silent whenever Sloan herself walked through, with another box full of her belongings.

Will was feeling slightly more like himself after a better night's sleep, but the Sloan situation had done nothing to improve his mood. As he and Mac exited her office after greeting each other that morning, they found several of their staff clustered around Kendra's desk.

"…Daisuke Tanaka has offered to resign today," Sloan was translating. "He said, 'I apologize to my company, my government, and my country'." Sloan's shoulders sank, and her eyes fell shut in despair. "Please," she said, turning to Will, "I have to fix this now. Help me."

"Well, to start with—" began Mac, leaning over to see the screen more closely, but Sloan cut her off with a single raised eyebrow.

"Kenzie, I love you," said Sloan, rolling her eyes, "but a Japanese man's honour is at stake, and sometimes your wisdom leads to…" She trailed off, simulating an explosion with her hands.

Mac could almost feel herself shrinking, and she flushed, feeling the weight of all of their eyes on her. "No, I get it," she said quietly. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, trying not to show how much it stung.

"Will?" Sloan asked again.

Will frowned, looking back and forth between Sloan and Mac, but Mac was determinedly avoiding his gaze. "We'll figure something out," he grunted at last, before stalking back to his office, rubbing his forehead once more.

Mac and the others got down to business, piecing together that evening's episode of News Night, but Sloan's dilemma kept niggling at the back of her mind. Sloan's words still smarted, but there was something about her friend being punished for telling the truth that galled at Mac, and she just couldn't let it go. For the rest of the day, whenever she had a spare moment, Mac spent it searching for any possible way out of this mess. Charlie and Don and Will chimed in with their own ideas periodically, but it was Mac, by far, who put the most energy into it.

She took a break from her brainstorming only to sit with Will at lunchtime, indulging once more in the quiet and the darkness of his office. They had not seen each other outside of work for several days, and between his headache, which had returned with a vengeance, and Mac's waning stamina and battered self-esteem, this separation was beginning to take its toll on them both. Despite their exhaustion, they looked forward to a quiet dinner at Will's place after work that night.

Mac returned to her office to pack up while Will changed after the show, and she was soon absorbed, once again, in trying to solve Sloan's problem. Just before they went on the air, the news had broken that the radiation levels were now, indeed, at a seven, and this only fueled Mac's determination even further. When Charlie poked his head into her office to say goodnight, she was perusing a website on Japanese numbers and counting. It all seemed unnecessarily complicated to Mac, who had to read it three times before she thought she understood.

"Any luck?" asked Charlie.

"Nothing that will help Sloan," Mac replied, discouraged. "If this was anyone else, we could just play dumb and say she got the word wrong, but—"

"What are you talking about?" Charlie interrupted, entering the room properly and shutting the door behind him.

Mac explained what she had been reading. "But she's fluent," she concluded. "It's not like she can pretend she suddenly forgot how to count." Only then did Mac realize that Charlie was staring at her incredulously. "What?" she asked, a feeling of dread growing in the pit of her stomach.

As Mac watched in disbelief, Charlie whirled around, flinging her door open once more. "Sloan Sabbith, you get down here this instant!" he shouted.

Mac's jaw dropped. "Wait. Charlie, you aren't seriously suggesting—"

But Mac didn't get the chance to finish, because Will entered the room just then, eyeing her curiously. A sullen Sloan joined them moments later.

"I am here," Sloan announced, offering Charlie a bow of mock deference.

"What's the Japanese word for four?" Charlie asked, without preamble.

"Shi," said Sloan slowly, plainly wondering where Charlie was going with this.

"What's the Japanese word for seven?" he continued.

"Shichi."

"Those words are easy to mix up," Charlie stated firmly, and Sloan's eyes narrowed, comprehension dawning. With Sloan glaring murderously at him, Charlie went on to explain how this would salvage Tanaka's reputation. Again and again, Sloan interrupted, trying to reason with him, but Charlie would not be swayed.

Mac had remained uncharacteristically silent throughout this exchange, not taking her crestfallen eyes off of Charlie. In a way that she could not have explained, Mac felt wounded, as if Charlie's actions were a personal attack. She had spent all day searching for a solution, sure there was some way for Sloan to escape this situation with her dignity intact, and with one fell swoop, he was undermining everything she had tried to do.

Mac looked away from Charlie at last, and turned desperately to Will, wordlessly begging him to be the voice of reason. To her dismay, he seemed to see the plan's merits, because he merely shrugged, adding yet another blow to Mac's pride.

"We're all just going to lie, and I'm going to look stupid," Sloan complained.

"Charlie, you can't be serious!" Mac protested indignantly, when it was clear that nobody else was going to side with Sloan. "She's got to go on the air and say she thought it was a seven, when it was really a four, that then moved up to a five, and she's really sorry, but also now it's really a seven?"

Sloan cast Mac a withering sideways glance, once more leaving her feeling about two feet tall.

"It won't be our proudest moment," Charlie agreed, "but it'll help everyone concerned out of a very tricky situation."

"Will?" Sloan asked, drawing him into the conversation for the first time. "You want me to do this?" She glanced back and forth between him and Charlie, having forgotten entirely that Mac was even there.

Will's scowl deepened further still. "Have you got a better solution?" he asked. "This fixes it. Let's just get this over with and move on."

Sloan nodded, resignedly, and Charlie swept her from the room, to get her ready to go on the air at 10:00.

"You ready to go?" Will asked Mac shortly. She nodded, and they left at once, neither having any desire to hang around and watch. They rode in silence on the way to Will's apartment, and made only small talk over the leftover takeout that Mac found in his fridge.

"What a long day," Mac groaned, slouching over the table, her head propped up on one fist. "I feel so awful for Sloan about all of this."

Will merely grunted, and Mac glanced up at him in surprise. "Doesn't it bother you, what we made her do tonight?"

"Sure," Will replied. "But Sloan's a big girl. She got herself into this mess, so she can deal with the consequences of what she did."

"Of course, but—"

"I'm more bothered by the fact that she treats you like you're some kind of intern," Will interrupted, leveling her with his gaze at last.

Mac swallowed hard and set down her fork. "Do we have to do this now?" she asked, sitting up straight. On top of everything else that had happened today, the thought of having an argument with Will tonight was just too exhausting for words.

"Yes, we do," Will said adamantly. "Mac, she insulted you in front of the entire staff this afternoon, and you just let her get away with it."

"It wasn't a big deal," Mac lied, hoping to put him off, but this only annoyed Will further.

"You are a Peabody-winning journalist!" Will argued, using his hands for emphasis. "Sloan is very smart, and she's good at what she does, but she isn't you, and you let her treat you like you're lucky she knows you even exist. If anything, it's the other way around. Where on earth is your confidence lately?"

"In case you haven't noticed, I haven't exactly been brimming with confidence for a few years now," she said. She strove to keep her voice light, pleading with Will to just take the hint and let this go.

But Will was not so easily deterred. "Mac, she calls you Kenzie!" he burst out, stopping just short of pounding the table with his fist.

"I know," Mac said quietly. She had been wondering for two days how long it would take for Will to bring this up; truthfully, she was surprised he had held off this long.

Her own family had only ever called her Mac, or Mackenzie, but countless friends and teachers and colleagues over the years persisted in calling her Kenzie, and every time it felt like a condescending pat on the head.

The first time it happened, she was seven, and Joanna Green's mother had asked what she wanted for her birthday. She had laughed when Mac proudly announced that she was asking for a tape recorder of her very own.

"Kenzie," she chuckled, playfully ruffling Mac's hair, "wouldn't you rather a new doll or a pretty new purse instead?"

Taken aback by the teasing, Mac had blushed crimson, and fallen silent at once.

Over the years, Mac would become much better at sticking to her guns and going after what she really wanted; she spent the entire summer of her first internship bravely correcting her senior producer on her name before he finally got the message. Still, that name, and all its implications, never failed to make Mac's insecurity rear its ugly head at the worst possible moments. She told Will once that the relentless use of this cutesy diminutive always took her right back to that moment in her childhood; it felt like a reminder that she was too young and too female to succeed in this industry.

Will was clearly recalling the same conversation, because he went on, "Just because Sloan knows things you don't about the economy, that's no reason to let her treat you like a little girl!"

On a day when Mac was already feeling raw and slighted, Will's disapproval simply chafed too much to take. "Do you think I don't know I let her get into my head?" Mac snapped, pushing herself up and away from the table. "It's the story of my life! Someone starts saying things, I start believing them, chaos ensues."

Will opened his mouth to respond, but now that Mac had started, she found that she couldn't stop rambling. "It's threatened every good thing I've ever had," she continued, counting her examples on her fingers as she listed them. "It's why I gave up on my singing lessons back in secondary school, it's why I almost got talked into quitting my junior year at Sarah Lawrence, and it's why I made the mother of all screw-ups by ch—"

Mac clapped both hands over her mouth before the rest of that sentence could escape, but the damage had already been done. She stared at Will, horrified, her chest heaving, her eyes impossibly wide. He stared back at her, frozen as still as a statue.

"By cheating on me," he said, when he found his voice at last.

"Will, I'm so sorry," Mac said miserably, sinking heavily back into her chair. "I had no idea I was going to say that."

"But you meant it," Will said softly.

Mac nodded, desperately tired once more. That lost, injured look on Will's face joined the growing collection of images that were permanently burnt onto her retinas.

"I don't – I don't understand," Will said, raking a hand through his hair as he got to his feet, reeling aimlessly around the room. "You said—"

"I know what I said," Mac whispered, so quietly that he had to stop moving to hear her properly. She cleared her throat, which had gone dry in anticipation of her next words. "The truth is – the truth is, when I told you last week that I didn't deserve how wonderful you're being, I wasn't just talking about now. I felt like this when we were together before too."

Mac wasn't remotely ready for this conversation, wasn't ready to see the look on Will's face when she mentioned Brian by name, but they had obviously reached a crossroads. If they didn't talk about it now, tonight, it was all just going to keep getting swept under the rug forever, and that simply couldn't go on any longer.

Will's eyes hardened, but he said nothing, merely crossing his arms in front of his chest.

Mac took a deep, shuddering breath before she could speak. "I told you last year that you were perfect, and I meant it. For two years, you did everything in your power to make me happy. You gave me everything I ever wanted, and I never felt like I did enough for you in return."

Will scowled at her, clearly not wanting a reprise of the argument he thought they had settled the week before, but Mac soldiered on. "We always ate at my favourite restaurant, we went on vacation where I wanted to go. You took me to every Broadway show ever written, because you knew how much I love it. You gave me everything, Will. What did I ever do for you? And then people started saying that I wasn't good enough for you, that you were only with me because I must be good in b—"

"Don't you dare finish that sentence!" Will spat, his whole body trembling with fury.

Mac sighed. "It doesn't matter," she said quietly, too weary even to appreciate his outrage at this slur against her honour. "I was already thinking it myself; it didn't take a lot of convincing for me to believe them."

She was almost finished. This was certainly the end of them, the end of these incredible couple of months that had been a gift beyond her wildest imaginings, but she couldn't stop now. Her words clawed inside her throat, but she forced them out. "And then, one night, Brian called. I was drunk, and you were out of town, and—"

Will held up a shaking hand to stem the flow of her words, his face screwed up in what looked like actual physical pain, and Mac broke off abruptly, absolutely spent. She watched him scrub his face and drag a hand through his hair once more, physically unable to remain still through this torment. He said nothing for several minutes, and after a while Mac could bear the suffocating silence no longer.

"I should go," Mac said, reaching for her purse. "I'm sorry, I'll—"

This jolted Will from his stupor. "No," he said. "No, I'm – I need to go for a walk. Please don't leave. I'll be back." Mac watched him almost run from the apartment, flinging himself into the elevator as soon as it arrived. The sound of the doors closing behind him echoed hollowly in his wake.

Mac remained seated for a few minutes, her limbs turned to stone and grown too heavy to move. It was always this way for her – while the battle raged on, she could always find the will to keep fighting, but the moment it was over, she would collapse, having absolutely nothing left. Will wasn't like this – no matter how hurt or tired or sad he was, she had never seen him lose the will to move, because he had to believe that he could outrun it.

Finally, with gargantuan effort, Mac heaved herself to her feet. Neither she nor Will had eaten more than a few bites of their dinner, but she threw it all away, and washed their dishes in the sink, her mind blank and her body numb. She scrubbed at the same plate for several minutes before noticing that the water pouring from the faucet was freezing cold.

Mac turned off the tap and wiped her hands on her jeans to dry them, her eyes drawn to the wine rack above the counter. She grabbed a bottle of red wine and carried it over to the couch, wishing she could just crawl inside it and hide. She held the bottle for a long time, staring at it, but in the end she never did more than pass the bottle back and forth from one frozen, trembling hand to the other. Eventually, she set it down on the coffee table, and got to her feet once more.

Mac wandered wraithlike around the apartment, unable to feel even the floor beneath her feet. After a cursory pass around the living room and down the hall, she found herself standing in the doorway to Will's bedroom, a room she had not entered once in the two months since they got back together.

Not even bothering to turn on the light, Mac sank onto what would have been her side of the bed, curling herself up into the tightest of fetal positions. Only then, with Will's scent all over the pillow, did she allow the tears to fall, crying so hard that she thought it would tear her in half.

At last, when she had no tears remaining, Mac simply lay there, too drained even to uncoil her limbs and cover herself with a blanket. She wondered, fleetingly, whether she had enough time. Perhaps if she could only breathe him in for long enough, when he came home and ended things for good, then she would have enough to tide herself over for the rest of her life. The last thing Mac wanted was to be there when he returned, but Will had asked her to stay, and she just couldn't find it within herself to refuse him anything anymore.

It might have been minutes or hours later when Will finally did come back. Mac flinched when the elevator announced his arrival, and then traced the creak of every footfall around the apartment, her heart racing. Through his eyes, she saw the table, cleared of their dinner; saw her purse hanging on the back of her chair; saw the unopened bottle of wine on the coffee table. She heard him check the living room and the study, before coming down the hall to the master bedroom, and finding the door open. He caught sight of her, just a shadow in the dark room, and she thought she heard him let out a sigh.

Will came to sit on the side of the bed, inches from Mac's feet. He laid a hand on her leg, rubbing it gently. "Mac, are you awake?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, her voice flat and hollow, though her heart was trying to pound its way out of her chest.

"I'm sorry I took so long," Will said. "I'm glad you stayed."

I'm dying, Mac thought, and suddenly it was impossible to prolong this moment any more than was absolutely necessary. "Are you breaking up with me?" she asked, holding her body rigid.

"What?" exclaimed Will. "No! Listen, will you sit up so we can talk about this?"

A flicker of hope flared up inside her, but Mac was too tired and too sad to trust it, and it was extinguished almost at once. As Will leaned over her to turn on the lamp, Mac slowly pulled herself up, her aching muscles protesting at the change of position after so long. She sat cross-legged near the edge of the bed, and Will winced, his heart breaking a little when he caught sight of her red and puffy eyes.

Mac reached behind her for the pillow, hugging it tightly to her chest. Her hair had nearly all come loose from its ponytail, and it fell forward, shielding much of her face from view. She buried her nose in the pillow, unable to look up and meet Will's gaze.

"You wanted to know what you ever did for me?" Will asked, laying what he hoped was a comforting hand on her knee.

Of all that had been said between them tonight, this was where he wanted to start? Mac peered up at him in surprise. "Yeah?" she said warily.

"I wasn't an optimist before I met you."

Mac snorted bleakly, looking away again. "You're still not an optimist," she said, her voice hoarse.

"No," Will agreed. "But you are. And your optimism is the thing I've always loved best about you." Will reached up and tucked Mac's hair behind her ears. She shivered, and his hand returned to her knee, the warmth of his touch finally beginning to seep through the fabric and into her skin.

"It's – I don't know, it's contagious or addictive or something," Will went on. "Having you in my life before made me want to be happy, made me want to believe it was actually possible. You believed in me, and that made me want to be the better journalist, the better person that you thought I could be. I felt like I could do anything."

Mac bit her lip, her mind fuzzily trying to work through this utterly unexpected logic. But Will wasn't finished.

"And then last year, you came back. You came barging into my office, pitching our show, telling me we could take on the world, and despite my best efforts, there was that feeling again. The last thing in the world that I wanted to do was listen to a word you had to say, but your faith, your conviction in the whole thing, and in me, that's what made me want to give you and our show a fair chance this time around. Even when I was still so hurt and so angry that I couldn't see straight, even then, I still couldn't bear to let you down."

Mac's mind spun, trying to process all of this. Could it really be that simple?

Seeing her worry her bottom lip between her teeth, Will knew that she wasn't entirely persuaded. "Mac, please," he begged, "I need you to understand this. I'm not an optimist. I'm never going to be. This feeling of wanting to be happy, wanting to be better, this is the closest I'm ever going to get, and I never had that before I met you. I still don't know how to do it without you."

Will unclenched Mac's fingers from around his pillow, moving it aside, and taking her hands in his, warming them with his touch. "I never cared what we ate or where we went," he said. "I just wanted to be with you. I just want you."

Mac's eyes filled with fresh tears at these words. Will turned slightly, and she allowed him to pull her into the warmth of his embrace, her breath hitching in her throat as his arms came around her. The pillow may have smelled like him, but it paled in comparison to having his steady heartbeat against her ear, and his fingers tangled in her hair.

"Would you stay here tonight?" Will asked after a while, his voice muffled into her hair.

Mac's heart gave an almighty lurch. "Will, I don't think—"

"I know we're not there yet," he interrupted. "I know we still have a lot to work through, I know you still blame yourself. I know all that. Tonight, I just want to hold you."

Mac fell asleep that night exactly as she had on the night of the snowstorm, Will's arms around her and her head tucked under his chin, but her heart felt lighter than it had in years. She knew, better than anyone, how much Will hated talking about his feelings. That he had gone to such lengths to articulate how he saw her role in their relationship was more valuable than any gift he had ever given her. For tonight, at least, her love and gratitude were able to outweigh the guilt.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Once again, thank you so much for reading! I struggled a lot with this chapter, but I think I'm finally happy(ish) with it. As always, I really appreciate any comments or constructive criticism!