Martin appeared a moment later, apron on, spatula in hand. He'd gotten slightly greyer since high school but the energy was exactly the same — big, loud, aggressively warm in ways that took some people by surprise and had never once surprised me.
He looked at me for a second. Just a second. Then he crossed the room and pulled me into a hug hard enough that I felt it in my ribs, and neither of us said anything for a moment.
“Good to have you upright,” he said gruffly, when he let go.
“Good to be upright,” I said.
He clapped me on the shoulder, nodded once like that settled something between us, and turned back to the oven. “Cookies in three minutes. Sit down.”
The kitchen was chaos in the best possible way. Poppy was already stealing cookie dough from the bowl on the counter, Micah was explaining the difference between snickerdoodles and sugar cookies to Talia like it was a matter of national importance, and Maple was wagging her tail hard enough to knock over a chair.
I settled onto one of the kitchen stools and watched it all unfold, and felt something in my chest go quiet in a way it hadn't in weeks. No tension humming under every conversation, no waiting for the other shoe to drop, just noise and warmth and the smell of cookies and a dog who kept trying to convince everyone she hadn't been fed since 2019.
Rook appeared next to me with a mug of coffee, and I took it gratefully.
“Your dad hugged me like he knew I needed it,” I said quietly.
“He did know.” Rook leaned against the counter beside me, close enough that our arms touched. “He's been worried about you. They both have. The whole time you were in there.”
I looked over at Martin, who was now letting Poppy decorate a cookie with entirely too much icing while narrating the structural engineering challenges of the design. “He didn't say anything at the hospital.”
“He sat in that waiting room for two days and brought terrible vending machine coffee to everyone and didn't leave until they told him you were stable.” Rook glanced at his dad. “That's Martin Kincaid saying it.”
My chest did the uncomfortable thing again. I looked back down at my mug.
Martha appeared with a plate of cookies and set them in front of me. “Eat,” she ordered. “You're falling behind.”
I ate three before I registered I was doing it, and when I looked up the whole kitchen was watching me with varying degrees of amusement.
“What?” I said around a mouthful.
“Nothing,” Talia said. “Just nice to see you eating real food instead of protein bars and spite.”
“I do not live on protein bars and spite.”
“You absolutely do,” Micah said. “Last month I watched you eat the same granola bar for three days in a row.”
“That's called budgeting.”
“That's called concerning.”
Poppy leaned against my shoulder, warm and solid, and went quiet in that particular way she had when she was done being funny and meant what she was about to say. “We're glad you're okay,” she said, and the shift in tone settled over the kitchen like a hand pressed flat.
I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her closer. “I'm glad I'm okay too, Pops.”
The quiet that followed wasn't uncomfortable. It was the kind that came after something true had been said and nobody wanted to rush past it.
Rook pushed off the counter beside me. I recognized the set of his shoulders — the one that meant he'd decided to do something and was going to do it before he thought himself out of it. He glanced at me once, checking.
I nodded.
“Hey.” He said it to the room, not loudly, but with enough weight that the conversation dropped. Talia looked up from her coffee. Micah turned around. Poppy lifted her head from my shoulder. Martha and Martin both went still. “Soren and I are together.”
The kitchen went quiet in a way that was different from ordinary quiet. Martha had her mug halfway to her mouth and stopped there, and Martin had gone still with the spatula in his hand, and neither of them said anything for a moment that stretched just long enough to feel weighted.
“Oh,” she said. Quietly. Not surprised exactly. More like a woman setting down something she'd been holding for a while.
Martin looked at me. Then back at Rook. He put the spatula down on the counter and said, “You know, your mother and I used to argue about you two.”
