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“Well, it sounds like y’all have figured out my whole life for me,” I said.

“I wonder how it’s going at Lillian’s intervention,” my sister whispered.

“What?”

I pulled out my phone, somehow unsurprised when Lillian responded immediately.

“Yeah, it’s my first.”

A corner of my mouth quirked up. I’d missed her sassy humor.

“See!” Maria jumped up, pointing her finger so close to my face she almost stabbed me in the nose. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile since you broke up. You need to go talk to her. Now.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Mark piped up. “Aunt Maria will stay with us tonight. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s presumptuous,” I grumbled.

I opened my message string with Lillian.

Any chance you’d be up for meeting at our usual place? The brew pub, I mean, not the Hotel Six. The terrorists holding me here say we need to talk. If we don’t do it now, I have a feeling that they’ll just find a way to Parent Trap us later.

Her response was immediate.

I’ll leave now. See you there in a bit.

Fifteen minutes later I was waiting in the lobby of the brewpub, pacing nervously. I wasn’t totally sure what I was going to say, but if our families and friends had gone through all the trouble of planning simultaneous interventions, I felt like we owed it to them to at least talk. And maybe we owed it to ourselves as well.

Lillian strode into the restaurant, looking like a woman on a mission. I took about ten seconds to categorize the gauntness that told me she hadn’t been eating, and the dark circles around her eyes hinting at sleeplessness. Then I stalked across the lobby, grabbed her face between my hands, and kissed her. Hard.

She melted into me, opening her mouth with a sigh, and suddenly everything was right in my world again. I kissed her until someone cleared their throat loudly and when I ignored them, they tapped on my shoulder.

“Sir! Ma’am! Did y’all want to get a table? Or were you thinkin’ you were at the Hotel Six up the street?”

Lillian grabbed my hand. “Let’s get a table. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m suddenly starving. They didn’t serve any food at my intervention.”

“One star,” I joked. “Don’t recommend.”

We were shown to a booth in the back and over double cheeseburgers, beer, and a huge basket of fries we shared our intervention stories.

“Lillian, I owe you an apology. I should have fought harder for us, not just gone along with breaking up.”

She shook her head. “No, honestly I wasn’t in a place to hear it then. My friend Becky thinks we gave up so easily because we’d both been abandoned by our partners in the past and, well, the truth is, despite what a pain in the ass it is with the distance and our schedules and everything, I feel like she might be right.”

“What would you think about us moving to Kenilworth?”

“Us?”

“Me and the boys.”

“You can’t do that, Martin. They have school...and what about Maria? She’s like a mother to them.”

“I’ve been informed that they don’t mind changing schools, and John’s been pushing Maria to move in with him, so she’s fine with it too.”

Lillian stared at me for a long moment. “I don’t feel right about asking you and your boys to give up your whole lives for us.”

“We’d be doing it for ‘us’, all of us, not just your ‘us’,” I said.

She laughed. “That almost made sense. Are you sayin’ that your boys want to change schools and move away Houston?”