I caught Eliza’s glance, warm and wondering, as if she was memorizing the feeling too.
Tilly yawned big, sleepy and content, and Lois took her post as bedtime escort, ready to go upstairs, tail wagging softly. The house felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for the next good thing to happen.
Chapter 20
Eliza
Tilly didn’t wait for permission.
She grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the stairs with the urgency of someone who had Very Important Things to show me. “Come see my room,” she said, already halfway up. “Daddy, let me put the stickers on myself.”
Nate caught my eye over her head, a silentgood luck, and I let Tilly tow me upward.
Her room was at the end of the hall, door thrown wide like it had no secrets. The first thing I noticed was the color—soft blues and warm yellows, nothing too precious, nothing too careful. The second thing was the height of everything. Stickers were scattered along the closet door at exactly Tilly-eye level, crooked and overlapping, some peeling at the corners. Stars. Dinosaurs. One lonely unicorn that had clearly lost a fight with gravity.
“I did those,” she announced proudly, pointing. “Daddy said straight ones are boring.”
“They’re perfect,” I said, and I meant it.
Her bed was low and piled high with stuffed animals—bears and bunnies and one very loved octopus with a missing eye. Books were stacked in messy towers beside it, pages dog-eared, bookmarks improvised from ribbons and old receipts.A nightlight shaped like a llama glowed softly on the dresser, casting a gentle wash of light across the room.
It felt lived in. Joyful. Like a place made for a child instead of a photograph.
I thought, unbidden, of my own childhood bedroom—everything matching, everything untouched. The kind of room you weren’t supposed toexistin too loudly. No stickers. No mess. No evidence I’d ever been a kid at all. Just a space meant to look pretty for my mother’s friends to admire when they brought their daughters over for a playdate.
This room looked like love.
“There’s my dancing shelf,” Tilly said, hopping onto the bed and pointing out her little trophies and ribbons with wild enthusiasm. “And that’s where Daddy sits when he reads. He does the voices.” She gestured to a rocking chair in the corner, then plopped onto the edge of the bed.
“I do not do the voices,” Nate called from downstairs.
“Yes, you do,” Tilly yelled back. “You do the dragon ones the best.”
I laughed, feeling things I never thought were meant for me. The room felt full of possibility—of scraped knees and bedtime stories, and stickers added whenever someone felt like it. Of a little girl who was allowed to take up space and feel all of her feelings with glorious abandon.
Tilly dove beneath the covers and resurfaced, clutching a very well-loved reindeer with one floppy antler and a sweater that had seen better days.
“And this is Waffles,” she said reverently. “Remember him?”
My heart actually skipped. “Waffles the Reindeer?”
She nodded hard. “You know him!”
“I do,” I said, crouching so I was eye level with both of them. “I met him first. At the Coffee Cabin.”
Her face lit up. “Daddy said you’d remember!” She pressed Waffles into my hands like a ceremonial offering. “He came home with me from the grocery store by our old house. Daddy said he needed a real family.”
I swallowed. “That sounds like something your dad would say.”
Waffles was softer than I expected, the kind of softness that only comes from being hugged a lot. One button eye was slightly loose, and the stitching on his nose had been repaired—carefully, lovingly.
“He sleeps here,” Tilly announced, hopping off the bed and bounding over to the corner of the room. She showed me a little wooden cradle, hand-painted and clearly homemade, tucked beside the bookshelf. Inside it were two other stuffed animals, arranged with the kind of care usually reserved for sleeping babies.
“Oh,” I breathed. “He has a cradle.”
Tilly nodded as she tucked him in with the other stuffed animals. “Daddy made it. Because Waffles was lonely at night. I can’t sleep with him, I throw everything on the floor when I’m dreaming, even my blankets. I’m very kicky.”
From the doorway, Nate cleared his throat. “He was having a hard time adjusting,” he said lightly, but his eyes were soft. “Big move. New town.”
