“Elizabeth,” Daddy said defensively.
“Which is lovely,” Momma agreed, “but it wasn’t you.”
She looked at me then, really looked at me, the way she always had when she wanted me to hear something important.
“You came into our lives after a lot of waiting,” she said. “After a lot of hoping. And when we held you, the only thing I could think was how much light you brought with you. Even then.”
“Joy,” Lily said as she smiled at me, like she’d just cracked the code.
Momma smiled. “Exactly.”
My chest ached with it—the knowing, the belonging, the fact that even as my world tilted on its axis, this truth stayed solid and unmovable.
“You chose me,” I whispered.
“We did,” Daddy said firmly. “Every day.”
Sunny leaned harder into me, and I let myself breathe again.
“I think,” I said slowly, “this man—Micah—he sees me in a way that’s new. Not just who I am, but who I could be.”
Cassie smiled. “That’s scary.”
“Yes.”
“And kind of gross,” Bo added.
“Yes,” I repeated, laughing softly through tears.
From inside the house came the low murmur of voices—men planning, plotting, shouldering something heavy together. I knew, instinctively, that what they were deciding would ripple outward in ways none of us could fully predict.
But that wasn’t my role right now.
My role was here. With my family. With the girl I’d been and the woman I was becoming standing in the same space for the first time.
“I’m not disappearing,” I said, because suddenly it felt important to say it out loud. “I’m not leaving this behind.”
Momma cupped my cheek. “We know.”
“I’m just … growing.”
Daddy smiled then, proud and sad and steady all at once. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
The screen door creaked behind me, and I didn’t have to turn to know Micah had stepped onto the porch. I felt him the way you felt weather shift—subtle, undeniable.
He didn’t interrupt.
He just stood there, close enough to be counted, far enough to respect the circle I was standing in.
And for the first time, my family saw me with a man—not as a girl being protected, but as a woman who had chosen.
I reached back without looking, my fingers finding his for just a moment.
Connection.
Micah didn’t step fully into the circle—he hovered at the edge of it, like he understood instinctively that this part of me wasn’t his to claim.
But the fact that he was there at all—boots on my parents’ porch, broad shoulders filling the doorway, eyes scanning the yard like threats might crawl out of the marsh grass—made my family go quiet in a way that felt … reverent.
