“It’s beautiful,” Jayne breathes.
“Rustic,” Finn corrects.
“Artisanal,” I add.
Mikaela lights the candles that are also the number eighteen on the cake.
“Make a wish!” she instructs.
Jayne looks at me over the candles. “I already got mine.”
I feel it like a punch. I lay my hand on hers and squeeze.
We blow out the candles together.
When Mikaela starts hacking pieces of the cake, I whisper to Jayne, “There’s pecan pie in the fridge if this is inedible.”
“I can hear you,” Mikaela grumbles.
“You can have pie, too,” I offer with a wink.
She scowls at me.
Later, after the dishwashing chaos and the frostingcleanup, after the kids go to bed and the candles have burned low, with the kitchen still smelling faintly of lemon and sugar, I take Jayne’s hand and gently tug her toward the living room.
“What?” she asks, amused.
“Dance with me, baby.”
“There’s no music.”
“I’ve got that covered.”
I thumb my phone, and a familiar beat fills the room.
En Vogue’sDon’t Let Go.
Her eyes widen, then soften.
“We danced to it in that crappy apartment with the broken radiator,” I remind her.
“It was noisy as all get out.” She steps into my arms, fits like she was made for me. “It rattled, but itwasfunctional.”
“Just like us.” I kiss her nose.
“We were so young.” She looks up at me, her eyes filled with love.
“We still are.” I swing her around.
She laughs.
As the song plays, we sway like we did when we were seventeen and thought love alone could fix anything.
“Eighteen years,” she murmurs. “Can you believe it?”
“Some days.” I breathe her in. “Some days I still think we’re twenty-one and stupid.”
“We were never stupid. Naïve, maybe. But we did the best we could with what we knew.”
