It's just up there. Holding itself up. The way it always was, the whole time, even when I couldn't see it for all the people swearing it was about to fall on my head.
I close my eyes and fall asleep quickly.
The way I did that first morning I woke up in this house—like a woman who's finally,finallyallowed to rest.
EPILOGUE
Njal
Three months after our move, our apartment smells like my mother's cornbread.
I've stopped being surprised by how much that wrecks me every time.
She's in our kitchen right now—my kitchen, mine and Sophie's, the top half of an old house with good light and a yard that's already half dug up by a hound who can't believe his luck—standing at the stove with a dish towel over her shoulder.
She’s been teaching Sophie the cornbread the way she swore she would the day she heard I cared about this woman.
"You've got to let the skillet get angry," Ma says. "Hot enough to spit at you. That's the secret nobody writes down."
"That sounds dangerous," Sophie says.
"Most good things are." Ma bumps her with a hip. "Pour."
I stand in the doorway, watching my mother teach the woman I claimed how to make the food I grew up on.
I have to look down at the dog for a second because the feeling's too big to hold with my face.
Hoagie looks back up at me like he gets it.
He probably does. He came from nothing, too, until the woman we love saved him.
The whole table shows by six, because in my family, invitations are theoretical and arrival times are a contact sport.
Bjorn comes through the door first, because of course he does, with a six-pack he didn't need to bring and a grin he's been saving the whole drive.
"Sothisis the famous apartment." He sets the beer on the counter and turns a slow circle, taking in the place, the curtains Sophie picked, the framed thing on the wall. "Huh. It's got, like, throw pillows. Coasters. My brother owns coasters." He picks one up and holds it like evidence. "Brother, a few months ago you were sleeping in a small ass town with one stoplight."
"And now I own coasters." I take the coaster out of his hand and set it back down. "Weep about it."
"I might." He claps me on the shoulder, and the grin softens into what lives underneath it, the part only I get to see. "You look good, man. You look—" He stops, because we don't do this out loud, the two of us, we never have. He squeezes once and lets it say itself.
"Yeah," I tell him. "I know. You too."
Then Sophie comes around the corner with flour on her cheek, and Bjorn's whole face changes, and he opens his arms wide.
"There she is. The woman who tamed my brother." He hugs her like he's known her for years instead of months, because that's how my family does it, all at once or not at all. "I've been hearing about you since before he'd admit there was a you."
"He doesn't admit much of anything," Sophie says.
"He's been like that our whole lives. I used to think he was broken." Bjorn winks. "Turns out he was just saving it all up for you."
Everly and Regnor come with all three kids and a bag the size of a body.
Eira comes through gracefully even though she glares at us with her pre-teen charm.
Mykelti is all giggles and smiles, asking her mom for her tablet.
And Boden…the second that boy is through the door my father—Kraken, terror of three counties, a man I've watched make grown patched men go pale—drops to the floor on his knees to make a fool of himself.
