My jaw works, but I can’t find words. So I just let him pull me into a signature Sean hug, hard and soft all at once. He pats me on the back, slapping really, and then releases me like he’s unleashing me on the world.
I nod at him and Declan and walk away toward my car. I slide into the seat, waving through the windshield, and watch them get into their own cars and leave.
Is this family? People you watch get safely home? People to hug when you don’t have words to say thank you? Is that all it’s beenthis whole time? Family is Willow tucking that envelope into the couch. Family is in her eyes.
22
WILLOW
The house settlesaround me as I paint, old pipes sighing, the AC kicking on with a cough, the distant hiss of tires through the humid Charleston night. My body hums with all the hearts inside it, and when I press my fingers into my stomach, the triplets move around and away from me or toward me.
It’s been hard not to think of my sister and my mother lately, the people they haven’t been for me, the relationships that my father crushed when he abandoned us. None of us are the same. I paint the water like I always do, a familiar sight, something steady and maternal. I paint the glittering sun in her waves and wonder how Cheyenne and Dylan are doing, if they’re thinking of me or if they’re happy to have some time off from me with the guys stepping in so much lately.
This isn’t the future I pictured by a long shot, but I’m starting to get used to the idea of what it might be—this thing brewing between me and them. It’s real. I wasn’t imagining it.
The outside light strips across the ceiling. Headlights. I hold still and listen as a car door clicks and the lock beeps. After a minute, the softest knock follows. Not a demand but a request.
I open the door and find Rowan standing on the porch, hands in his pockets and a look in his eyes like a wounded animal. Something wild, something afraid. A hint of hunger. He’s half turned away, like he’s ready to abort the mission at the first hint of a no.
“Hey,” he says, eyes searching mine. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but whatever he finds gives him relief. His shoulders loosen a fraction.
I smile, leaning against the doorway. “You want to paint something with me?” I ask, nodding toward the canvas on the table.
He shrugs, his eyes shining bright. “Sure.”
“Come on.” I usher him in. “Cheyenne’s here still, sleeping, so we have to be quiet.”
I nudge a second canvas toward him. He takes the chair opposite me. We don’t talk at first. We mix color. His brush tests the water jar like it’s a stethoscope he doesn’t quite trust.
He squeezes a careful line onto his palette. “When I left earlier,” he says eventually, swishing blue into white, “I told the lads something I’ve been trying not to say out loud.”
I keep my brush moving. “You don’t have to?—”
“I want to.” He sets a wash, watches it spread, corrals it with the side of his brush. “I think part of why I told you not to check…is because I was afraid you’d only want me if some piece of paper told you to.”
The bristles pause in my fingers. I look up.
He’s already shaking his head, a rueful little smile. “That’s not it,” he rushes on, voice lower. “I don’t mean it like a test. I mean—I want to be chosen. By you. I don’t want a lab to do it for us.”
“Rowan.” I reach for him without ceremony. His hands are cooler than mine. When our fingers lace, he looks at our hands like they’re an answer to a question he didn’t think he was allowed to ask. “I know you have some things you’re working through, and so do I. But to answer the question—I want you here with me because of me. You don’t have to be afraid of emotion around me. I cried over a broken tea bag the other day. I’m not one to talk.”
“What are you working through?” he asks lightly, but I can feel the care threaded through it.
I suck on the inside of my cheek, unsure of how much I want to say. He seems to feel the hesitancy because he says, “So you get to know all about my past, but I can’t know about yours. Classic.” But his tone is teasing, his eyes set on his painting again.
“My dad left when I was ten.” The words creak out, old hinges being honest. “He had a mistress. Married her. Had kids. He just…left to go do life with them.”
“Christ, I’m sorry, Willow.”
“It blew up everything. I’ve got a sister, Camille, I barely talk to. My mom floats. I started surfing and painting and convinced myself I’d be single and free forever because you can’t really trust anyone.” I rinse my brush and watch the blue cloud the water. “And then you all arrived and detonated my thesis.”
He huffs a breath of a laugh, flicking a curl back. “You detonated ours too.”
“I know,” I say, and mean it in the heavy way.
He glances at my canvas, then his. “I needed it,” he admits. “My world blown open enough that I couldn’t hide in it.”
“I see you,” I whisper.
