Actually smiling, the real one, the one I see maybe twice a week if I'm lucky, and I want it so badly it scares me.
Leah stays for dinner.
I don't ask her to.
Wrenleigh does, because subtlety isn't her thing. "Stay for dinner. Dad always makes too much anyway."
She looks at me. I nod before I can talk myself out of it.
We eat at the kitchen table. The four of us.
The girls on one side, Leah and me on the other.
Wrenleigh talks enough for all of us.
Sadie Jo eats her food and watches Leah with those quiet eyes and doesn't say much, but she doesn't need to.
Her being at the table, present and open and not retreating to her room, says everything.
Leah helps clear the dishes.
Our hands brush at the sink—knuckles against fingers, warm and brief and electric—and neither of us says anything about it, and both of us feel it, and I know she feels it because her breath catches for half a second before she picks up the next plate.
She leaves at eight. The girls are doing the rest of their homework in the living room, and I walk her to the door.
"Thanks for the PT stuff," I say. "And for Sadie Jo. She doesn't warm up to people."
"She's a good kid, Coin. They both are." She pauses on the porch, her keys in her hand.
The October air is cold and she's still in her scrubs and she should be home, warm and resting.
Instead she's standing on my porch looking at me with those steady Mercer eyes—the same ones her brother has, but softer. Warmer.
"You've done something good here," she says. "With them. By yourself." She gestures at the house behind me. The light in the windows, the sound of Wrenleigh arguing with the cat about the couch again, Sadie Jo's music playing low from the living room. "This is a good home, Coin."
The words hit somewhere I don't have armor for.
Ten years of doing this alone and no one—not one person in a decade—has looked at what I built and called it good.
Not out loud. Not to my face. Not standing on my porch with the porch light catching the scar above her eyebrow and her eyes saying something her mouth hasn't figured out how to say yet.
"Thank you," I say. And I mean it in a way that I don't have the words for, so I just say it once and hope she hears everything underneath it.
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she nods, turns, and walks to her car.
Bloodhound is in the shadows at the end of the porch.
He watches his sister drive away, then looks at me.
I wait for it—the warning, the threat, thethat's my sisterconversation we already had once.
He just nods. One nod. Then he settles back into the porch chair and goes back to watching the street.
I close the door. I lean against it. I listen to my daughters in the next room.
Alive, safe, laughing about something stupid, existing in the warm space of a house that a woman just called good.
Then I pull the coin from my pocket and flip it in the dark hallway, catch it, hold it, and think about all the things I can't afford to want and the one thing I might not be able to stop wanting no matter how hard I try.
