TERMS OF THE HEART
"It's contagious, apparently. You should be more careful who you let catch it."
He laughed, pulling me close, and I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how strange and wonderful it was to watch happiness ripple outward from a single desperate contract signed less than a year earlier — Sofia finally letting herself want something back from Griffith, Eleanor softening week by week into a woman who called just to talk rather than only to strategize, my own father laughing again in a way I hadn't heard since before his stroke.
"Do you think it's always like this?" I asked Damien later that night, curled against his side in bed. "Once you let one person in properly, everyone arou