Grace pov
I sat curled up in one of the comfortable armchairs in Jace's sitting area, a book open in my lap though I had been reading the same page for the past ten minutes without absorbing a word. My mind kept drifting back to earlier—to Jace's panic, his vulnerability, the fear in his eyes when he'd found me.
*I lost you all over again,* he'd said, and the raw terror in his voice had cracked something in my chest.
I had kept my response measured, careful. Had reassured him without making promises I wasn't ready to commit to. But the truth—the truth I was still too afraid to say out loud—was that I wasn't going anywhere.
Somewhere over the past few weeks, I had stopped thinking of this as temporary. Had stopped mentally preparing for the day I would return to Colorado. Because the t
