Briggs ordered enough food to make the waitress stare at him in silence for three full seconds before writing it down. Vivi corrected the order in which everyone’s drinks should arrive because water needed to come before anything sticky. Cade apologized to her with complete seriousness, which made Bliss press her lips together to keep from smiling.
Ryan and Skylar got into a debate about whether energy drinks were a personality trait or a cry for help. Rider taught Vivi how to fold a straw wrapper into a tiny paper hockey stick, and Briggs watched like he had just been replaced in his own emotional role.
“You’re jealous,” Skylar told him.
“I am wounded by paper engineering,” Briggs admitted.
Vivi slid the tiny stick toward him. “You can have this one.”
Briggs froze.
Cade leaned toward Bliss and murmured, “He’s going to cry.”
Bliss whispered back, “I know. It’s precious.”
“I am not crying,” Briggs said, his voice thick with betrayal. “My eyes are hydrating out of respect.”
Mom looked at him over her mug. “You’re a sweet boy, Briggs.”
He pressed both hands flat against the table and stared at her. “If you keep saying things like that, I cannot be held responsible for forming a maternal attachment.”
“You may form one after I finish my coffee.”
“Fair boundary.”
Everyone laughed, and I let myself sit in the middle of it without trying to fix anything for half a minute. Skylar’s cheeks were pink from being included. Vivi’s shoulders were relaxed enough that her headphones remained around her neck instead of covering her ears. Mom had eaten half her waffle, which meant she was either starving or comfortable enough to stop performing fine for us.
That should have been enough, and it almost was.
Then Vivi looked across the booth at Bliss and Cade and pointed toward the small velvet pouch beside Bliss’s coffee. “What’s in the bag?”
The laughter thinned gently, not disappearing so much as softening.
Bliss glanced down at the pouch, then at Cade. He gave her one tiny nod, and she pulled it closer with both hands. “Those are my Nevers. My friends Aura and Charm bought them for me.”
Skylar leaned forward. “What are Nevers?”
Bliss untied the pouch and poured several marbles into her palm. They caught the morning light from the window, tiny and bright, all different colors, like little planets in her hand. Cade’s expression changed as he looked at them, grief and love passing through him so quickly that someone who didn’t know him might have missed it.
“They started with my mom,” Bliss said. Her voice stayed steady, but Cade’s hand found her knee beneath the table anyway. “After she died, there were all these things I knew she would never get to see. Big things. Small things. Stupid things that shouldn’t have mattered and mattered anyway. I started thinking of them as Nevers.”
Vivi’s attention sharpened. “Things that happen and she will never know?”
Bliss nodded. “Exactly.”
Skylar’s expression shifted, her fourteen-year-old armor lowering by an inch. She looked at me, then Mom, then down at the marbles.
Dad’s absence sat at our table as surely as the plates did.
Cade reached into the pouch and took out a deep blue marble, rolling it once between his fingers. “They’re not supposed to fix grief. They just give it meaning.”
Vivi considered that. “Like a physical representation.”
“Yeah,” Cade said softly. “Like that.”
Briggs cleared his throat. “For the record, I respect the hell out of grief marbles.”
Skylar glanced at him. “You are one emotional-support vest away from being a therapy dog.”
