I stop her just before we reach it.
“Saint,” I say, lowering my voice. “You took on the Onryo Forty-Nine by yourself.”
She looks at me now, eyes wide and absolutely unimpressed.
“I would rather fight them again,” she says flatly. “Please.”
I chuckle and reach for the gate. “It’ll be a walk in the park.”
The gate swings open and it’s chaos.
Dozens of people. Fifty, maybe sixty. Kids running everywhere. A long table covered in food. Balloons. Music blasting. Spanish flying from every direction at once, loud, and fast and alive.
Saint freezes.
Her mouth actually drops open.
She looks at me like I’ve betrayed her.
“You said it would just be family,” she says slowly, chewing her gum like it personally offended her.
I look around, taking inventory of the faces. “Si. This is just the family.”
Saint looks like she wants to throw the pasta salad like a grenade and run but it’s too late.
My sister spots us instantly. Her face lights up, one hand already resting on her very round belly as she waves wildly and shouts my name. My mother appears beside her, eyes locking onto me like a missile system.
And then they’re moving.
Saint barely has time to react before she’s swallowed whole.
Hands on her arms. Cheek kisses from both sides. Rapid Spanish questions she is trying to catalog. Someone plucks the pasta salad from her hands. Someone else relieves me of the gifts. An aunt she’s never met hugs her like they’ve known each other for years.
She looks back at me over my mother’s shoulder, eyes narrowed, panic sharp and unmistakable.
“If I yell Skippy,” she says through clenched teeth, “I need an extraction. Immediately.”
I laugh, helpless and fond.
“I’m sure you can handle yourself.”
She disappears into the crowd, dragged toward the center of the madness, and I watch her go—this lethal, brilliant woman who has never belonged anywhere like this in her life.
And somehow, against all odds, she’s standing in the middle of it anyway.
My brother-in-law shows up at my side with a beer and a grin like nothing in the world has ever gone wrong.
“Brother.”
We hug, solid and familiar, the kind that saysyou made it back alive.
“It’s good to see you,” I say, and I mean far more than tonight.
The party blurs after that. Laughter. Music. Old faces I haven’t seen in years pulling me into conversations that feel like they never paused. Stories overlap. Someone presses food into my hands. Someone else claps me on the shoulder like they’rechecking I’m real.
And through all of it, Saint.
I spot her eventually, still being dragged from group to group by my mother, introduced like a prized discovery. She’s laughing now. Really laughing. Talking with my sisters like she belongs there, like she always has. The purple sundress she chose moves when she does, light and dangerous, the color pulling her eyes sharp and bright.
