"Thank you, Iris," I grumble.
She beams and gives me a flick of her eyebrows. "You're welcome."
Ma sets a plate in front of Tanya. Eggs, bacon, toast, grilled tomatoes. More food than any human needs at eight thirty in the morning, but that's my mother. Her love is expressed through excess, and if you try to refuse, she takes it as a personal attack on her character.
"Eat," Ma says. A command, but delivered with a warmth that takes the edge off. She squeezes Tanya's shoulder as she passes, a brief touch, easy and maternal, and I watch Tanya go very still beneath it. The kind of stillness of a person being touched with kindness and not knowing what to do with it.
Grace shifts Lorcan to her other side, and the baby makes a small, contented sound against her chest. Tanya's gaze drifts back to them, and I can see the question forming before she asks it.
"How old is he?" she asks Grace.
"Six weeks." Grace tilts him slightly so Tanya can see his face. He's half asleep, milk-drunk and heavy-lidded, one tiny fist curled against Grace's collarbone. "His name's Lorcan. He's an angel right now, but give it three hours and he'll be screaming the place down. It's his hobby."
"He's beautiful," Tanya says, and the way she says it catches me off guard.
"Do you want to hold him?" Grace asks. "After he's done eating? He's a cuddler. Gets it from his dad,” she adds with a grin and a wink that makes Liam roll his eyes good-naturedly.
"She doesn't have to—" I start, because I know Tanya, and I know that being offered something before she's ready can feel like pressure.
"I'd like that," Tanya says.
I close my mouth.
Liam catches my eye across the table. He doesn't say anything. Just raises his coffee mug a fraction, the smallest acknowledgment, and I read everything in it.She's doing okay. You're doing okay. This is working.
Ma sits down at the head of the table with her own cup of tea and surveys the room with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who has all her children under one roof and a new daughter-in-law to feed. She catches me watching her and gives me a look that says more than any words could.
She belongs here. I can see it. Now make sure she sees it too.
I pick up my coffee and lean back in my chair and watch my wife eat breakfast in my mother's kitchen. She's sitting between Iris, who is already telling her something about a disastrous date she went on last month, and Grace, who is gently easing a drowsy Lorcan off her breast and onto her shoulder for burping. Tanya is listening to Iris with an expression that's fighting between amusement and disbelief, and she's eating the food my mother made, and she hasn't smoothed her hands over her clothes once since she sat down.
She doesn't know it yet.
But she's home.
Tanya
Lorcan falls asleep in my arms.
It happens so quietly I almost miss it. One moment he's blinking up at me with dark, unfocused eyes, his tiny mouth working around nothing, his fingers curled around mine. The next, his body goes heavy and warm, his breathing slows, and he's out. Just like that. Complete trust in a stranger, because he's six weeks old and hasn't learned yet that the world isn't safe.
I stare down at him and something cracks open in my chest that I don't have a name for.
Grace notices first. "He likes you," she says softly. "He doesn't fall asleep for just anyone. Killian held him last week and he screamed for forty minutes straight."
"In my defense," Killian says from across the table, waving a forkful of eggs, "I was holding him correctly. He just has terrible taste."
"He has excellent taste," Katya says beside him. "He could sense your energy."
"My energy is delightful,” Killian observes.
"Your energy is terrifying,” Iris deadpans.
I listen to them bicker and I hold the baby and I try to understand why my eyes are burning.
I don't cry. I haven't cried since I was sixteen and my mother told me that tears were a currency and you should never spend them in front of people who wouldn't value them. It was one of the last things she said to me before she left, and I took it like gospel and I've never broken the rule.
But this baby is asleep on my chest, and Saoirse is pouring me more coffee without asking, and Iris is showing me photos on her phone of some celebrity she's convinced looks like Liam, and no one in this room is performing. No one is measuring me. No one is calculating my worth.
