Wanted All Along

Chapter Thirteen

Amara told her parents on a Sunday, the way she’d told them everything important her whole life—over her mother’s kitchen table, a pot of something simmering on the stove that neither of them would actually eat until the conversation was finished.

Her mother, Beverly, set down her tea the moment Amara said the word moving, her expression carefully neutral in the way Amara recognized as the calm before a hundred gentle questions. Her father, Samuel, said nothing at first, just watched her with the same steady attention he’d given every important announcement she’d made since childhood—good grades, college acceptance, the day she’d told them about Daniel two years ago, though she noted, with a small pang, that his expression today held none of the quiet reservation it had carried back then.

“Tell us about him,” Beverly said finally, folding her hands on the table. “Properly. Not the version you give Jade over the phone.”

“His name’s Kian,” Amara said, and found herself smiling despite the nervous flutter in her chest. “He runs his own company. We met on vacation, months ago. It wasn’t supposed to be anything, and then it was.”

“And the job,” Samuel said, his voice even, thoughtful. “Is that separate from him, or because of him?”

The question landed exactly where Amara suspected he’d meant it to, precise and gentle at once. “Both,” she admitted. “The job’s real. I earned it on my own, and I want it for myself, regardless of Kian. But I won’t pretend the timing isn’t connected. I wouldn’t have looked twice at a position in that city if I hadn’t met him first.”

Her father nodded slowly, considering that with the same care he brought to every decision, small or large. “That’s an honest answer,” he said. “I appreciate it more than you’d think.”

“We just want to understand,” Beverly added, reaching across the table to cover Amara’s hand with her own. “You know we’re not trying to talk you out of anything, baby. We watched you spend two years making yourself smaller for someone who didn’t deserve the effort. We just want to make sure this isn’t the same thing, dressed up differently.”

Amara felt something tighten in her throat, grateful and a little raw at once. “It’s not the same,” she said carefully. “I know it might look that way from the outside—moving my whole life for a man I’ve known four months. But Daniel never once asked me what I wanted. Kian asks constantly. He made sure I knew the job offer was real before I ever said yes to anything about him. He’s never once made me feel like I had to be smaller to keep him interested.”

“That matters,” Samuel said quietly. “That matters a great deal.”

They stayed at the table long after the food had gone cold, Amara answering question after gentle question—about Kian’s family, about the apartment she was already looking at, about whether she felt ready, truly ready, for a change this large this fast. She found, somewhere in the middle of it, that she didn’t resent the questions the way she might have expected to. There was no accusation in them, no attempt to control her decision. Just the careful, thorough love of two people who’d spent her whole life making sure she had what she needed to choose well, and who wanted, more than anything, to understand rather than object.

“I worry,” Beverly admitted eventually, some of her earlier composure softening into something more openly vulnerable. “Not because I don’t trust you. Because I know how easy it is to convince yourself something’s right when you want it badly enough. I did that once, myself, before I met your father. I moved across three states for a man who turned out to be nothing like who I thought he was.”

“What happened?”

“I came home.” Beverly said it simply, no bitterness in it, just old, settled fact. “It cost me a year and a great deal of pride, but I came home, and I was fine. Better than fine, eventually.” She squeezed Amara’s hand. “I’m not telling you that to scare you. I’m telling you because I want you to know that even if this doesn’t work out exactly the way you’re hoping, you will be fine. You have people who will always take you back in, no matter how far you go.”

Amara felt her eyes sting, unexpected and sudden. “I didn’t know that about you. The three states thing.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet,” Beverly said, a small, warm smile breaking through. “You’ll learn, when you’re older, that your parents had whole lives before you existed to interrupt them.”

Samuel reached over and squeezed his wife’s shoulder, an old, easy gesture between them that spoke of decades of exactly this kind of quiet partnership. “Your mother’s right,” he said to Amara. “About all of it. We’re not worried because we doubt you. We’re worried because we love you, and loving someone means wanting to catch them if they fall, even when you trust them to land on their feet.”

“I trust myself more than I used to,” Amara said quietly. “I think that’s the difference this time.”

“Then that’s all we needed to hear.” Samuel’s expression softened fully, something proud and warm settling into it. “Bring him around before you move. We’d like to meet the man who managed what nobody else did—getting our daughter to believe she deserves exactly what she wants.”

“I will,” Amara promised, feeling something settle in her chest, steady and grateful. “I promise, I will.”

She left that evening with a container of leftovers she hadn’t touched and a lightness she hadn’t expected to feel walking into the conversation, the particular relief of being seen fully by the people who’d known her longest, and finding, at the end of it, only love where she’d braced herself for resistance.

She called Kian on the drive home, the phone propped in its holder, her mother’s leftovers riding shotgun in a container that was already sending garlic and thyme through the whole car.

“How’d it go?” he asked, and she could hear the genuine nervousness in his voice, a rare c***k in his usual composure.

“Better than I expected. They want to meet you. Before I move.”

“That’s terrifying,” Kian admitted, and she laughed at the honesty of it. “I don’t think I’ve been properly evaluated by anyone’s parents before. My own family doesn’t count—they’ve never once asked whether someone was good for me, only whether they looked good next to me.”

“My parents aren’t like that,” Amara said. “They’re going to ask you real questions. My dad especially. He asked me tonight whether the job was about you or about me, and he wasn’t going to accept a half answer.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That it’s both, but it’s mine either way.” She smiled at the road ahead of her, headlights cutting through the early evening dark. “My mom told me something I didn’t know. That she moved across three states once, for a man who wasn’t who she thought he was. She came home. She said she’d have been fine either way.”

Kian was quiet for a moment. “Do you think that’s what this is? Something you’ll need to come home from?”

“No,” Amara said, and meant it fully. “But I think it’s important that I know I could, if I needed to. That I’m not moving because I have nowhere else to be. I’m moving because I want to be there, with you, and if it ever stopped being that, I’d have somewhere soft to land.”

“I like that,” Kian said quietly. “I like that you have that. I’m not sure I do, honestly—somewhere soft to land, I mean. My family’s love comes with terms attached. Yours sounds like it doesn’t.”

“Then maybe that’s something else you’re getting, moving forward,” Amara said gently. “Somewhere soft to land, that isn’t conditional on anything.”

“I’d like that,” he admitted, something unguarded in his voice. “I’d like that a great deal.”