The fire crackled. Rhett had run down his second story and the room had found its quiet, the comfortable, unhurried quiet that had built over weeks into something nobody needed to manage anymore. I turned my mug in my hands. The warmth of the ceramic had gone mostly through by now, just the memory of heat remaining.
Lila’s voice came low, and slightly drowsy, from just above my shoulder.
“You alright?”
I looked at the fire.
“Yeah,” I said.
The word sat there for a moment. Outside, the wind found the north eave the way it always found it, that thin, particular whistle, and then passed.
“Not exactly,” I said.
I said it to the fire, not to her, and I felt her go still above me with the same quality I had gone still before, not pulling away, not reaching forward, just becoming very present.
The fire did not ask me to explain myself, which was why I kept looking at it. I turned the mug without thinking about it, the ceramic warm and then cooler and then just an object in my hands, and the heat from the hearth came off the low-burning core of it in steady, even waves. Rhett had gone quiet in the armchair. For Rhett, that was a miracle. Cole had not moved from the far end of the couch. Nobody moved.
I looked at the fire.
“I grew up in a series of houses,” I said.
I said it the way I said most things that cost me: evenly, without a run-up. My thumb moved along the handle of the mug. “None of them mine. Foster placements, mostly. A stint with a distant aunt for about eight months when I was nine, she kept my bedroom door locked from the outside at night. Not mean about it, I don’t think. Just thought it was safer.” The fire shifted, a small collapse of the lower log settling against the grate. “For her, I mean.”
Lila had not made a sound above me. I could feel the particular quality of her attention, the full-facing stillness of a person who had decided to hear something and was going to hear all of it.
“After the aunt, a group home in Helena.” I paused, replaying the memory. “Staff rotated every few months. Different faces. Nobody stayed long enough to get your name right consistently, and after a while you stopped caring whether they did, because caring made the next rotation harder. You got good at being easy instead. Low maintenance. Useful when you could be.” My thumb ran its path along the handle again.“You learned that belonging somewhere was something that happened to other people. That it came with a set of conditions you were probably not going to be able to meet.”
I looked up at her once.
She was watching me with her chin resting on her arm at the couch’s armrest, her green eyes steady on my face, and there was nothing in them that looked like pity. I had expected pity, I had always expected pity when I said these things, which was why I said them so rarely, and what was there instead was something more careful and more willing than that. She did not reach for words to put in the space. She let the space just be.
I looked back at the fire.
“I got good at showing up,” I said. “Got good at making myself steady, making myself something people could lean on. It’s useful, that. People appreciate it. And I appreciated being needed, so we had an arrangement, and it worked fine.” I paused. The fire turned over its low core and went on burning. “Except I never stayed anywhere long enough to know what the arrangement was for. You’re steady for people and then you go, and you’re steady for the next set of people, and eventually that’s just what moving is. It’s just the thing you do.”
The room held the quiet.
Rhett’s chair made the small creak it made when he shifted weight. Outside, the wind had dropped, and the absence of the eave’s whistle made the room feel slightly more interior than it had, slightly more sealed against the cold.
“I’ve never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home,” I said. “I met Wade, then Rhett and we just matched. We became a pack. But we’ve never had a home.”
The word had a weight in my mouth that surprised me even now. I let it sit in the room. Then I looked up at her again.
“I don’t want to leave here.” I said it straight, without softening it on the way out, because softening it would have been a habit I was trying to stop having. Her face did not change in the way faces changed when you had said something alarming. It changed in the way it changed when something had gotten through the outer layer of her and reached the part she kept further back, the part that was less composed and more real. Her throat moved.
Her hand came down from the armrest.
It settled over mine, over the hand that had been turning the mug, her fingers resting across the back of my knuckles with a weight that was light and complete at the same time. I went still.
I sat with my hand under hers and I let myself feel the weight of it, the warmth of her palm on my skin.
Then I turned my hand over.
It was a slow movement, deliberate. My palm came up and her fingers settled into it, and I closed mine around them, careful.
I looked at the fire.
“When I look at you,” I said, and I did not look up while I said it because some things required the fire in front of you and not the face of the person you were saying them to, not yet. “When I look at all of you. At this house and the way the mornings work here, the way the cold comes in off the north field and the coffee’s already on.” I paused. My thumb rested on her fingers without moving. “And baby Hope.” I said the name the way I always said it, the way it felt when I said it, likesomething that asked to be handled carefully, like something given on trust. “The way you talk to her. The way she’s going to come into a room that has her name on the wall and a blanket someone folded for her.” My voice had gone quieter without my planning it. “It’s the first time I’ve understood what people mean when they say that word.”
