"MaeMae kissing!" Oisin announces to the room at large.
"Yeah, buddy, we all saw." Jamie's mouth is doing something suspicious at the corners, something that wants to be a smile, but then it flattens, and his eyes come to me. "Hey. Something's wrong with Cara."
My stomach plummets.
"What do you mean, wrong?" I'm already moving, past him, down the hall. "Wrong how?"
I hear his voice from behind me as he follows. “I dunno, she's just sitting there. She stopped packing and she won’t move. She's justsittingthere."
Oisin just got over a fever. Maybe she caught it. Or maybe it’s emotional. I told her to pack, upheaving her whole worldagain, the fourth home in four years for a girl who needs consistency.
I push open her door.
Cara is sitting on the edge of her bed. The bed with the lavender comforter Kathleen bought her because Cara touched it twice in the catalog. Her small suitcase is open on the floor, half filled, and her face… Her face wears a sad expression.
"Hey, sweetheart." I cross the room and crouch in front of her, pressing the back of my hand to her forehead, then her cheek. No fever. "Are you sick? Does your stomach hurt? Did you catch what Oisin had?"
She shakes her head.
"Did something happen?"
She shakes her head again, slower.
"Cara, baby, I need you to help me out here. Can you point? Can you show me what's?—"
“I…want…to…stay."
My jaw falls open.
Three years. Three years of silence, of notes and nods and reading her expressions, of a harried counselor with four hundred other kids barely acknowledging her trauma. Cara’s voice comes out small and rusty, but it is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard in my life.
"I want to stay," she says again, steadier now, watching my face. "Here. With Lorcan and Grandma Kathleen and Deirdre. I like it here."
I'm on my knees on the floor and I don't remember getting there. Behind me I hear Jamie whisperholy shitand for once in my life I don't correct his language, because—yeah. Holy shit.
"You talked." My voice is wrecked. "Cara. Baby. You talked.”
She shrugs one small shoulder, like it's nothing.
A sound comes out of me, half laugh, half sob, and I pull her into my arms and she comes, burrowing against me, her thin arms wrapping around my neck, and I see them all crowdedtogether—Jamie with his eyes wide, Oisin in his arms, and Lorcan, looking at this little girl like he’s incredibly proud of her.
"We're staying," I say into Cara's hair. I say it to her, and to Jamie, and to Oisin, and to the man I’m married to—my husband. “We can all unpack. We're staying. We're home."
Cara pulls back and looks at me with her big, serious, cataloguing eyes—and then she smiles. A wide, gap-toothed, nine-year-old smile.
And that's when the pile-on happens—Oisin launching off Jamie's hip onto the bed shrieking "STAYING!" at stairwell-echo volume, Jamie sitting down heavy beside Cara and knocking his shoulder into hers, muttering, “Say something else, weirdo,” while she giggles—out loud. Shegiggles, and the sound breaks me open all over again.
Lorcan plops down beside me and gathers us all in a group hug.
"So," he murmurs, just for me, "From now on, where they go, you go. Where you go, I go. Deal?”
I lean my head on his shoulder. “Deal.”
Chapter 23
Maeve
I've been dreading this day.
