A Greater Love
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 17
She planned the hike.
Not in response to a suggestion from Jack, not as the next item on an unspoken list. She’d spent two evenings in February researching trails on her phone, reading elevation profiles and reviews, assessing distances against what she knew about her own endurance. She’d chosen one in the hills above Crystal Springs — longer than the first hike, more elevation, a summit with a clear view of the bay — and she’d texted Jack on a Thursday.
Saturday. There’s a trail I want to do. Can you drive
He’d replied: What time?
Eight o’clock.
I’ll be there.
She’d put her phone down and sat with the particular feeling of having initiated something. Not uncomfortable. Just new. And underneath it, warm and certain, the knowledge of what she was going to say when she got to the top.
He picked her up at seven fifty-five. She was at the curb with a daypack — water, snacks, a light jacket — that she’d packed herself the night before.
In the car she gave him the trail head address without being asked. He entered it into the navigation and drove. They talked the way they’d been talking for months — easily, with the particular quality of two people who have spent enough time together that conversation doesn’t need to be constructed. She told him about a book she’d finished. He told her about a problem in AP Physics that had been bothering him for three days. She asked a question about it that he couldn’t immediately answer, which she found satisfying.
At the trail head she got out and looked at the path going up into the hills and felt the February air on her face.
“Lead,” Jack said.
She already was.
The trail climbed steadily for the first mile, rising through chaparral and scrub oak, the bay appearing and disappearing through gaps in the vegetation as they gained elevation. Étain set a pace that was deliberate and sustainable. She didn’t look back.
The second mile steepened. The path narrowed in places and she gave it her full attention, choosing her steps with the confidence of someone who has learned to trust her own judgment on uncertain ground. Jack came through behind her without comment.
By the third mile she could feel the elevation in her legs and her breathing, and she adjusted her pace and kept going. The summit was visible above them now — a rounded ridge with the sky behind it, the bay just becoming visible beyond, flat and silver in the February light.
She thought about a nurse’s office in October. A girl who had gone somewhere inside herself because the world had become unmanageable.
She thought about a Friday evening dinner and jollof rice and her mother’s eyes filling.
She thought about the words she already knew.
She reached the summit and stopped.
The view was what the reviews had promised. The bay stretched south from the ridge, silver-grey in the morning light, the hills on the far shore visible in the clear February air.
Jack came up beside her. They stood at the top of the ridge and looked at the bay and neither of them said anything for a moment.
It was very quiet up there. Wind, and the distant sound of a hawk somewhere below the ridge, and the particular silence of a high place.
Étain looked at the view for a long moment.
Then she turned to him.
“I love you, Jack,” she said.
Not I want to be yours. Not the careful, structured language of someone navigating unfamiliar territory. Just the words themselves, plain and direct and entirely hers, said in the voice of someone who has been holding something true for a long time and has finally decided to stop holding it.
Jack looked at her.
The wind moved through the chaparral below them. The hawk called once, far away. He held her gaze with the complete, unhurried attention she’d been watching him give to things that mattered since the first day he’d come down those stairs.
“I love you,” she said again. “I’ve known for a while. Since the billiard room, I think, though I didn’t have the name for it then. I just knew something happened that I couldn’t account for.” She paused. “I have the name for it now.”
She held his gaze without flinching.
“I want to be yours,” she said. “Not because you’re the safest thing I’ve ever found. Not because I don’t know how to exist without an anchor. I know how to exist. I proved that.” She gestured slightly at the trail behind them, at the summit they were standing on. “I want to be yours because I love you. Because I could search the world over and never find anyone who gave me what you gave me — selflessly, unconditionally, without ever asking for anything back.” She paused. “I told my mom last night. She cried. She said she couldn’t think of anyone else for me. Not for who I am.”
Something moved through Jack’s face. Everything he’d been holding back for ten months, carefully and correctly and at considerable cost, was right at the surface.
“Are you sure that’s a choice?” he said. “Or is it a need?”
She’d expected the question. She’d been preparing the answer since the billiard room.
“In the nurse’s office,” she said, “I grabbed onto you because the world had gone away and you were the only solid thing I could find. I didn’t know your name. I just needed something to hold on to and you were there. That was need.” She paused. “This is different. I know who you are. I know how you think. I know that you went four miles on a Friday afternoon last December because you felt something you didn’t want to feel and you dealt with it yourself instead of making it my problem. I know that you’ve been building something with me since October and that the whole point of what you built was for it to be mine.” She let that sit. “I don’t need you. I want you. I love you. And I know the difference.”
The wind moved through the ridge.
Jack looked at her for a long moment. Then he said: “I’ve been waiting every day, every hour, every minute to hear you say that.”
His voice was even. But she could hear what was in it — the full weight of ten months of holding something back, of doing the right thing when the right thing was also the hardest thing, of showing up every morning at seven forty-five and eating whatever she put on his tray and running four miles on Friday afternoons because he’d made a decision about what kind of man he was going to be.
“I love you, Étain,” he said. “I think I’ve loved you since Gerald knocked the water glass off the counter and you laughed and your whole face changed. I just — wasn’t going to say it until you were ready to say it back. Until you had enough of yourself to give.”
She looked at him. At this boy who had come down a flight of stairs for a stranger and spent ten months building her toward her own life without ever making her feel like a project.
“I have enough now,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You do.”
They sat down on the ridge.
Not to descend. Just to be there for a while, at the top of something she’d climbed herself, with the bay below them and the February air clean and cold and the hawk somewhere below the ridge doing what hawks did.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” Jack said. “About my parents.”
Étain looked at him.
“You know they’re not like other parents,” he said. “You noticed it the first night at the house. The way the household runs. The way my mom moves through it.”
“She’s remarkable,” Étain said. “She’s one of the strongest women I’ve ever seen.”
“She is,” Jack said. “And she’s my father’s submissive.”
Étain was very still.
“They’re in a Total Power Exchange marriage,” Jack said. “My father is her Master. My mother belongs to him — not because she has no choice, but because she chose it. Freely. From a position of complete strength. She runs the house. She makes decisions in her own domain. She’s a formidable woman in every way.” He paused. “And in all things between them, she yields to him. Because that’s who she is. And he leads her because that’s who he is. And they chose each other because they understood what the other one was.”
Étain looked out at the bay for a moment. Taking it in.
“Denise,” she said slowly. “I never would have — she doesn’t look like what I thought a submissive looked like.”
“That’s because you thought a submissive was someone without power,” Jack said. “My mother has complete power. She just chooses where she places it.”
Étain sat with that for a long moment. Something was rearranging itself in her understanding — the whole picture of the Turner household, the library door, the hand on the small of her back, the way Nathan occupied a room and Denise moved through hers. It had always been right there. She just hadn’t had the framework to see it.
“How do you know all this?” she asked.