We turn off the main drag into my parents' neighborhood, and their place comes up on the left with a hand-paintedPORTER FAMILYbanner strung between two trees. The yard's already full of trucks and folding tables and at least nine children running in a pattern only they understand.
“Okay,” I say, to the windshield. “Okay. Here's the situation.”
“We know the situation,” Finn says.
“You met about a month ago at the diner, it's casual but serious, nobody's rushing anything, and if my Uncle Ray asks any of you whether you hunt, the answer is a noncommittal noise and a change of subject.”
“Do they hunt,” Hudson repeats, delighted. “Is that a test? Is there a wrong answer?”
“The wrong answer is a long answer. Uncle Ray doesn't want a conversation, he wants an opening.”
“Noted,” says Logan, who means it, who has probably already sorted Uncle Ray intoavoid eye contact, nod, retreat.
I take one more breath. My scent's a mess, I can feel it, four weeks of fraying suppressant and a truck full of alphas and the particular terror of my childhood backyard, all of it broadcasting whatever it's broadcasting. There's no fixing it now.
“Last thing,” I say. “Whatever happens in there. Thank you. All three of you. For doing this.”
There's a silence in the truck that goes on a half-second too long. Finn's looking at me in the rearview. Logan's gone still. And Hudson, when I glance over, isn't grinning anymore.
“Josie,” he says, quiet. “We're notdoinganything.”
And I don't know what to say to that, because if I let myself hear it the way he means it I'll come apart in the driveway, so I open the door and get out into the noise instead.
It works.That's what I can't get over. It works immediately and completely, because it isn't acting.
We've barely cleared the trucks before my mother is on us, vibrating, hands pressed to her chest, taking in the three large alphas arranging themselves around me like it's the second coming. “Josie.” She says my name like a held breath. “Josie, sweetheart. Look at you. Look atallof you.”
“Mom, this is Finn, Hudson, and Logan.”
She doesn't even do the math out loud. She justbeams,this woman who has spent six years gently asking when it's going to be my turn, and her eyes go bright, and she says, “Well, comein,come in, you must be starving, we have so much food, Frank! FRANK, she's here, she brought herpack,” and the word lands in the yard like a bell, and I watch the news ripple out across forty-one relatives in real time.
And then it's a blur, the way these always are. But different.
Because every other reunion I've walked into this yard alone and walked the gauntlet alone. The coleslaw and Aunt Deb's sympathy and the settled packs leaning in over their potato salad to ask, so kindly, so gently, whether I'dmet anyone.
And this year there's a hand at the small of my back the whole time. Finn's, mostly, large and steady, steering me out ofconversations before they go bad, a fresh drink appearing in my hand whenever the old one's empty. Hudson charming an entire table of my aunts into helpless laughter. Logan crouched in the grass twenty minutes in, fixing a kid's broken toy truck with a multi-tool, surrounded by a small reverent audience, because of course he is.
I keep waiting for the seam to show. It doesn't. There's no seam. That's what's wrecking me. You can't find the edge of a lie that stopped being one somewhere around a kayak.
“He's good with kids,” my mother murmurs, appearing at my elbow, watching Logan hand the fixed truck back to a four-year-old like he's awarding a knighthood. There's something wet in her eyes. “That one. Josie. He'sgoodwith them.”
“Mom.”
“I'm not saying anything. I'm choosing not to say anything. I just.” She squeezes my arm. “I waited a long time, baby. That's all. I'm allowed to be happy.”
And it's the exact thing that's been eating Finn alive for a month, handed to me now in my own mother's voice in my own backyard.I waited a long time.The joy I'm going to have to do something about, eventually, somehow, when this ends.
If it ends. I don't know anymore what this is or when it stops, and standing in the smell of my mother's barbecue with three alphas threaded through the afternoon like they grew here, I am running out of road on the lie I've been telling myself, the one underneath all the others — that I'm going to be able to give them back.
I findCara at the dessert table, because of course Cara is at the dessert table. Cara has been at the dessert table at every family event since we were six. Now she's there with a plate in one handand the other resting on the considerable curve of her belly, flanked by three large men in varying states of hovering.
Nate's got a hand at her lower back and a deputy's resting suspicion aimed at the dessert table itself, like a tray of brownies might make a sudden move. Theo's holding a second plate she's clearly already commandeered from.
And Lucas, the doctor, watches her like he's quietly monitoring her blood pressure and would rather lose a limb than say so out loud. A whole pack, orbiting one pregnant omega and her lemon bar.
It's the most settled, real, effortless thing I've ever seen, and looking at it makes me ache somewhere I'd rather not look.
Cara sees me and her whole face does something I do not like, because Cara is the one person in this yard who knows.
