“What?” I murmur, low enough for only her.
The corner of her mouth lifts. “Nothing.”
I arch a brow.
She looks back down at her plate, smiling to herself. “You’re a natural.”
“At what?”
“Being here,” she says simply. “Fitting into the chaos.”
I look around at the table, at the noise and warmth and love packed into every inch of it, and I can’t help the thought that rises up in me.
I want this.
Not just the meal. Not just the room.
The future it represents.
The one that has her in it.
“I’m glad I’m here,” I say.
Harlow glances at me again, and something in her expression shifts, like maybe she’s having the exact same thought.
At least I hope she is.
“Me too,” she says.
And I know she means something bigger than the table.
After dinner, the cousins migrate to the living room. Ron claims the armchair and starts narrating the game to no one in particular. Patrice and Sherry clear plates in a rhythm that suggests decades of practice. Thomas tops off everyone’s drinks, then lingers in the kitchen doorway looking like a man who is deeply, profoundly satisfied with his life.
I get it.
Kai ends up on the back porch with a mug wrapped between his hands, staring out over the yard. I know better than to interrupt whatever’s going on in his head. He’s been quieter since dinner, not in a bad way. Just in the Kai way. Processing something internally that he’ll eventually come back from when he’s ready.
Harlow finds me in the living room, where I’ve somehow been dragged into a conversation with her cousin Marcus about whether a hockey player could survive a football season.
I have several opinions on that, but before I can share any of them, Harlow appears at my shoulder.
“Can I steal him?” she asks.
Marcus waves us off immediately, already halfway into a different conversation with someone else.
Harlow tips her head toward the back door.
I follow.
The yard opens up behind the house, sloping down toward a stretch of water at the edge of the property. A lake—small, butreal—with the surface catching the last thin light of evening and the glow from the bonfire Thomas must have built while everyone else was cleaning up, because it’s already burning steadily in the stone pit near the tree line.
A few people have drifted outside. Wren has a blanket around her shoulders, and suddenly Kai’s extended porch brooding makes a lot more sense.
Harlow wraps her arms around herself and tips her face up toward the sky.
I watch her do it.
There’s something about her outside. She always seems to take up a little more space—not physically, but in the way she exists. Like open air gives her permission to be less careful. Less contained. Like whatever she spends so much energy managing indoors goes quiet out here.
