“Yes.” I nod, although I don’t think my mom has those, and she’s not home for me to ask her. “Do you have them?” She nods and wipes her eyes. I help her up, and I can see her wince, and then the tears she was trying to stop from falling start sliding down her cheeks. “You’re being really brave. I know it hurts,” I tell her. “Can you walk?”
“I”—she sniffles—“think so.” We are only down the street from our house, but I don’t know if she can walk.
“Let me help,” I tell her as I let her put her hand around me because I don’t think I can pick her up.
I walk with her next to me, letting her put most of her weight on me, and after a few minutes, we are back at our house. “Dad!” I call out as soon as we walk in the door. He comes walking out of his office, which is just off the entryway.
“Oh, Princess, what happened!?” He rushes toward us and drops down in front of her.
“I…fell… and it… HURTS!!!”
He turns to me, and I wince. “We were riding our bikes, and she fell off… and… I’m sorry!” I don’t want to get in trouble, but I really want Halle to be okay. I don’t want her to be mad at me either.
“It’s okay, these things happen.” He lifts Halle off the ground, and part of me wishes I could have done the same so she didn’t have to walk. Maybe next year when I’m six.
I follow them up the stairs, but I’m not sure if she wants me there, so I hang out in the hallway until I hear a scream, then, “WILD!”
“I told you it would burn, sweetheart. It’s antiseptic. We don’t want it to get infected!” her dad tells her, and when I walk into the bathroom, I see her seated on the edge of the sink, her eyes squeezed shut. “Wild, where are you!” she squeals.
“I-I’m right here,” I tell her, and I hate how upset she sounds.
She opens her eyes and puts out her hand for me to hold. I take it, giving it a tiny squeeze, and when I look up at her, she’s giving me a teary-eyed smile before turning back to her dad. “Wild said I was brave.”
“You certainly were. My brave big girl,” he tells her, and I nod in agreement as he puts two Band-Aids on each knee. “But maybe no bikes for the rest of the day.” He pulls her off the sink and sets her gently on her feet.
“You did a good job,” he tells me as he ruffles my hair. “I can tell she trusts you. You’re a good big brother, Sebastian.”
“The best!” Halle says, then hugs me tight. I smile because I think this is the first time anyone has ever said I was the best at anything.
I open the door to the hotel room to see Halle sitting on the bed with her laptop in front of her. She gives me a questioning look before I climb onto the bed and rest my head in her lap. “Did you go see your mom?”
“No,” I say. Things with my mom were still a work in progress. We did plan to see her while we were home, but it was going to be brief, just long enough to announce our engagement. I could tell she was trying, but she was still struggling with her feelings about it all. “I went to see your dad. I felt like he should hear the big news from me.”
“I see.” Her hands stroke my hair, and I reach up to grab her left one before putting it in front of my face to see the engagement ring I’d given her last weekend. It’s only been a week, and I’m already anxious about putting the second one there, indicating we were officially married. “I think he would have taken it better than Sara did.”
I snort before turning onto my back to look up at her. “After which time she caught us having sex?”
She rolls her eyes and taps my nose with her finger. “I meant now, obviously. No, I don’t think my dad would have loved that when we were teenagers.” She sighs and leans back against the headboard. “Twenty-one years tomorrow. How is it possible that we’re that old?”
“No idea.” I chuckle darkly, thinking about how we are only in our mid-twenties yet have this tragic and formative experience from twenty-one years ago.
I can tell something’s on her mind and has been for the last few days. I figured it was about the upcoming anniversary, but now I’m wondering if there’s more to it. “You okay, baby? You’ve been… quiet the past few days? Is it just about being here? Or seeing my mom? If you really don’t want to, I can go by myself.”
“No. Well… I guess kind of, and the thought of seeing Mike too,” she says, referring to my mom’s now husband. While he talked Dylan into dropping those charges last year, he still seems to have his opinions on Halle and me and tends to stay away whenever we’re in town.
Fair, I guess.
I hated how disjointed my family felt, but all that mattered to me was Saint and the family I was trying to build with her.
On a more positive note, my board voted unanimously to keep me as CEO, noting that, while our relationship was unconventional, it came across as a beautiful love story rather than a scene from Pornhub.
I’m paraphrasing.
Not only do most people from my office support our relationship—I say most because I do know that a few people side-eye me, but they keep their opinions to themselves—but they adore Halle and love that she lives in Seattle now. They can always count on her to put me in a better mood after I’ve met her for “lunch.”
I sit up and move her to sit in my lap now. “She has been trying, and she wants to see us. But if you don’t want to go, I understand. I’ll be quick, and then we can have the rest of the day tomorrow to do whatever you want.” Even though on October eighth, there’s usually only one thing we’ve been known to do for the past twenty years. But now that we are together andare doing thatsometimes twice a day,I wonder if we’ll come up with a new way to spend tomorrow.
“No… I do… I just…” She bites her bottom lip. “I remember you saying that you wanted her to make a decision on how she felt about us before we… had a baby…” She grabs my hand and laces our fingers together before she looks up at me.
