Let’s just say I found glitter in places where it doesn’t belong for days after that.
“What are you writing over there?” I ask Oliver, trying to sneak a peek at his notebook. He pulls it away with a playful grin, holding it above his head and squinting his eyes at me teasingly.
“You’ll read it soon enough,” he says, smirking.
I put on my best puppy dog eyes and lean in closer. “But I wanna know now.”
He sets the notebook down and kisses the tip of my nose. “Same old, same old. Talking about how you’re my favorite person, how living with you is my favorite life, and how kissing you…” he leans in to press his lips to mine, “… is my favorite thing to do.”
“Doesn’t it get boring after all this time?” I whisper against his lips, a smile playing at the corners of my mouth.
“There are a thousand ways to describe how something becomes my favorite,” he murmurs, pecking my lips again. “And why it’s my favorite out of all the other options out there. Loving you will never get old, my Fave.”
“I love you, too,” I reply, kissing him once more before leaning against him and closing my eyes, soaking up the warmthof the sun while my hand reaches over him to absently stroke Peanut’s fur.
After a few peaceful moments, Grey joins us, having finally managed to leash Doctor, who comes barreling up and nearly plops right into my lap. Right now, it’s still almost possible for him to fit, but soon, he’ll be as big as Peanut, and I can only hope he’ll realize he is, in fact, not a lap dog.
“What do you guys think? Want to head home? All this chasing around has made me hungry,” Grey says, smiling down at me as he pulls Doctor off and extends a hand to help me up.
I smile back and take his hand, letting him pull me to my feet. Oliver and Misha stand as well, gathering up the blanket and our things while I clip Peanut’s leash onto his collar. Grey keeps a firm grip on Doctor’s leash, trying to prevent him from dragging us home while Peanut ambles along at a leisurely pace beside me.
I glance up at Grey, who’s already looking at me with a warm smile. “You ready for next week?” he asks, his eyes searching mine.
Next week, August and his family are coming to visit. I hadn’t heard from him in almost three years before he finally reached out, and we started to rebuild our relationship. It took him some time to figure out how to steer the law firm in a better direction, but he did it—even with our father’s reluctant blessing, though August said he doesn’t share all the details with him. Apparently, he and Abigail did make up, and she and the girls will be visiting, too, and I’m genuinely excited to see them.
“Ready as can be, but definitely excited,” I tell Grey, and he squeezes my hand reassuringly.
I haven’t heard from my parents since everything happened. I didn’t reach out to them, and they never tried to contact me—not a single call, letter, or message. Not even through August.
But that’s okay.
It’s more than okay.
It’s good.
Maybe closure isn’t what I thought it was. Maybe I don’t need to revisit every detail or rehash the past one more time. I don’t need to seek healing from the people who hurt me.
Maybe what I truly need is to honor my own feelings—to be the one who stands firm in the knowledge that the situation no longer serves me and its time has passed. Perhaps closure comes from trusting what I already know to be true.
If someone’s absence brings you peace, you absolutely did not lose anything.
But even though I’m good now,more than good,I feel a little vindicated.
I hope my success offends the shit out of them.
Not only am I good enough, I’m more than enough.
It’s a lesson I learned from therapy. It helped me work through my family issues and coping mechanisms. I’m feeling so much better and grounded.
Enough.
Talking to Grey during our many puppy walks helped a lot too. He also has a therapist now and seems to have finally found his own sense of closure with his parents. They send the occasional card and call every now and then—suspiciously, it all started once our success went public and the accolades began pouring in. At first, I was worried about how Grey would handle their obvious two-faced attempts to reconnect, but he’s taken it all in stride. He’s polite but distant, keeping them at arm’s length, just as they did with him his whole life.
I’m so proud of him, words don’t even do it justice.
We’ve built our own family, and after visiting Misha’s family two years ago and seeing firsthand what he meant bythey’re a little much, I’m even more grateful for the way ours is. Misha’sfamily is amazing but big—his four siblings all have at least two kids each.
Having this small, close-knit family of ours, packed with meaning and filled with our favorite people—it’s all I ever wanted.
