He knows what she means. Knows whatever she's done, he's the only man who's ever meant anything. The rest is business, what a person's got to do to live. Early on, Bill had gotten worked up about it time and again, but eventually he saw how much it didn't matter. How it was just Nancy doing her part. How the way she came back to him was proof she loved him best (didn't love the others at all, he was sure of it). It's all survival.

What they've got goes beyond that. It's always been more than survival. Survival's what he'd done all those years he was away, thinking her dead, thinking himself without place. Survival's rough and it's tenuous, awfully tenuous, and most days all you do is ache.

With Nancy, sure the days can be rough and there's always some damned thing or other to gnaw at him, but there are also times where the atmosphere settles out and things feel... well, right, almost. Like they are where they ought to be. And the world outside doesn't matter so much, sometimes seems like it can't get in at all. So he doesn't have to keep up his defenses anymore. So he can be alone with the one person he truly (don't think about that time, the past, that doesn't matter) trust.

That's what existing with Nancy is. It isn't just survival; it really, actually living. Not that Bill would put it that way; not that he even thinks it precisely that way. He feels the truth, even if he refuses words for it.

He leans forward to kiss her, firm without being insistent. "Ah, Nance. Always knew I could count on you."