"She gave you the top shelf."
I press my face into his chest because if I look at him right now I'm going to cry, and I've made it this far without crying.
But a thirteen-year-old girl quietly reorganizing a bathroom cabinet to make room forme—that's the thing that almost does it.
Not the violence, not the danger, not the declarations in rooms full of dangerous men.
A kid. Making space.
"Okay," I say into his chest. "But, I'm bringing my own pillows. Yours are terrible."
"My pillows are fine."
"Your pillows are flat and sad."
He laughs.
His arm tightens around me and he kisses the top of my head and we argue about pillows while the November wind pushes against the windows and the world, for once, feels exactly the size it's supposed to be.
EPILOGUE
Leah
The kitchen smells like butter and brown sugar and the kind of warmth that doesn't come from the oven.
Wrenleigh is standing at the counter with flour on her nose and a rolling pin in her hand, walking me through her grandmother's sugar cookie recipe with the intensity of a drill sergeant. "You're rolling too thin. They'll burn if they're too thin. Dad, tell her she's rolling too thin."
"She's rolling too thin," Coin says from the kitchen table, where he's drinking coffee and watching us with those blue-gray eyes and the almost-smile that isn't almost anymore.
It's real now. Small, private, but real. I see it every morning and I still haven't gotten used to it.
"I'm a nurse, not a baker," I say. "Cut me some slack."
"No slack. Grandma's recipe issacred. You mess up the cookies, you mess up Christmas."
"That seems like a lot of pressure for a sugar cookie."
"It's not just a sugar cookie. It's a legacy."
She's not wrong. These cookies—rolled and cut with the same tin shapes Coin's mother used, frosted in the same colors, bakedat the same temperature—are the one piece of his parents that he managed to keep.
She taught Wrenleigh when she was eight. She taught Sadie Jo when she was nine.
And now Wrenleigh is teaching me, and the fact that she's doing it—that she's letting me into this tradition, handing me the rolling pin and the tin cutters and the recipe card written in a grandmother's handwriting that I'll never have the chance to meet—says more than any words she's ever spoken to me.
Sadie Jo is in the living room.
Her music is playing too loud from the Bluetooth speaker Coin got her for her birthday, and nobody tells her to turn it down because the sound of a thirteen-year-old girl playing music too loud in a house that used to be too quiet is the best sound any of us have heard in months.
The house looks different.
Not drastically—the bones are the same.
Same hardwood floors, same kitchen table, same photos on the fridge.
But the couch is new.
The old one had memories neither of us wanted to sit on anymore, so we drove to the furniture store in Star City on a Tuesday afternoon and argued about fabric colors for an hour until Sadie Jo picked one and we both agreed immediately because Sadie Jo's taste is better than both of ours combined.
