Healing.
Parents.
I nudged open the door.
Granny looked up from her armchair by the Christmas tree we’d erected in her private suite. Her silver hair was brushed, her shawl a deep evergreen wool, and her eyes — hazel and sharp and familiar — lit up the second she saw us.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, my heart. Look who it is.”
“Hey, Granny.”
My voice cracked. Didn’t matter. She smiled anyway.
Ben set Connor’s car seat down and crouched beside it.
“Brought some people who want to see you.”
Granny leaned forward as I placed Alecia gently in her lap. Her gnarled fingers smoothed over the baby’s cheek with a tenderness that made something in my chest ache. It killed me that it was like the first time every time we brought the babies to see her, but I needed these moments just the same.
“She’s beautiful,” Granny whispered. “Just like her mama.”
“And stubborn like her daddy,” I said.
Ben shot me a look.
“Alecia is not stubborn, she is a perfect angel, and I will not stand for you slandering my little girl like that.”
Alecia immediately yanked his tie with surprising strength.
I raised my brows at him.
“Mm-hmm.”
Granny laughed, a thin, raspy little sound that still held all the warmth of every Christmas I’d spent at her kitchen table growing up.
“And this one?” she asked, nodding to the car seat.
Ben lifted Connor out, cradling him with that impossible gentleness he only ever showed with the babies… and with me.
“This is Connor,” Ben said softly. “We named him after your husband’s middle name.”
I hoped Grandpa Joe — or Joseph Connor Carlisle, if we were being proper — was smiling down on us.
Granny froze. She cupped Connor’s tiny face as tears welled in her eyes.
“Oh, Chrissy,” she whispered. “Joe would’ve… he would’ve loved that.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat.
“I know.”
“And Alecia?” she asked, glancing between us.
Ben answered before I could.
“After my mother,” he said quietly. “I wanted her name to live somewhere safe.”
Granny reached out, took his hand.
