I close my eyes, hoping she’s right.
“You know what I noticed?” Her voice is quieter now, almost a murmur. “When Leon has a bad dream and cries out in the night, you’re always there before me. Always.” A pause. “Your father never once came to you in the night, did he?”
I don’t answer. She already knows. No one ever came for me.
“Sit down,” she says. “Come here. Sit.”
She draws me toward the armchair in the corner of the room, the one she’d installed when Leon came home from the hospital so she could watch him sleep through the worst of the recovery. I sink into it, and she settles onto the arm of the chair, and then her fingers are in my hair.
The touch is so familiar it lives in my bones. Her fingers threading through my curls, slow and unhurried, the way she’s been doing since we were children sitting in the garden while my father raged somewhere in the house above us. The only thing that ever made the noise inside my head go quiet. I feel my shoulders drop. Feel the tight thing in my chest begin to unknot.
We stay like that for a long moment. Leon breathing. Her fingers moving. The old house settling around us.
“Mom and I have nearly finished redecorating the kitchen,” she says eventually, conversationally, like we’re discussing nothing in particular.
“I noticed. I like it. Sofia’s kitchen inspired you?”
Mina laughs. “It did.”
“Rosa still watches me like she’s cataloging evidence,” I tell her. “Did you see how she stood between me and Mason at dinner on Sunday? Physically stepped in front of him so I couldn’t say hello to the boy.”
Mina exhales, long and gusty. “Yes. It hurt you. I’m sorry. You’re trying so hard.” She’s quiet for a moment, her fingers still moving. “Rosa will come around. She’s just—she’s protective of those she loves. And she doesn’t know you the way I do.”
“She knows me fine,” I say. “She’s not wrong to watch me.”
“She is wrong about who you’re becoming. Who you already are.”
Leon stirs, murmurs something, settles again.
We both hold still until his breathing evens out.
Mina leans down and presses her lips to my temple. I can feel the warmth of her, the slight swell of her belly as she leans over me, our second child quiet and growing, and there’s a sensation in my chest that feels almost like peace.
“You’re not going to hurt our children,” she says against my hair.
“You can’t know that.”
“I know you.” She pulls back just enough to look at me, and there’s a gleam in her dark eyes that’s dry and certain and entirely hers. “And I know this. If you ever lay a hand on Leon or this baby in anger, Sofia has already taught me five of the seven ways to kill a man with a kitchen knife.”
A grateful smile tilts my lips. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She smooths my hair back from my forehead, satisfied.
Knowing that she loves me, knowing that she trusts me, makes me hope I’m becoming the man I need to be. I reach up and take her hand, pressing it against my lips. Her palm is warm, and her fingers curl slightly against my jaw.
I love her so much it’s a physical ache in my chest. A glow behind my sternum that I’ve been carrying since I was eight years old and couldn’t name it, taking up so much room that sometimes I can barely breathe when I look at her. I love the ache.
I love her.
She’s watching me with those dark eyes, steady and warm, the woman I have loved my whole life, carrying my child, in the house that is finally a home because she decided to make it one.
In the bed across the room, our son sighs in his sleep and pulls the T-rex a little closer.
I’m still my father’s son, and I always will be. His voice lives in the architecture of my mind. The scars don’t disappear completely.
But Mina is here.
And I stepped away from the bed.
