"Every single year." I catch my breath. "Worth it every time."
Cora is waiting for us with Gunner and Rosa. She tugs both of us over to where someone is taking pictures before either of us has agreed to it.
"We want a picture," she announces to the photographer, who is clearly delighted by the tutu.
"All three of you?" the woman asks.
"Yes." Cora positions herself between us and holds both of our hands. "Because we're together."
I swallow. Mark glances at me over her head and I see him accepting this by the way his jaw relaxes.
The photographer counts to three and takes the shot, and then a second one when Cora tells her the first one probably wasn't good enough.
When she shows us the screen, I see the three of us standing in the sunshine, Cora in her tutu and orange Converse looking cute as hell, Mark tall and relaxed with his thumb hooked through Cora's hand, and me on the other side, and we look like the family I haven't let myself picture in a very long time.
"Can we be a family?" Cora asks, looking up at Mark, and the question sucks the oxygen out of the space between us all.
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't look to me for rescue, doesn't redirect or deflect. He just crouches down and looks at her directly.
"Maybe we can," he says. "Would that be okay with you?"
She considers it with the gravity of someone making a very important decision. "Yes," she says. "But you have to keep up when we dance."
He laughs, placing his hand over his heart. "I'll practice," he tells her. Mark straightens up. His eyes meet mine. "Too much?" he asks quietly.
"No," I say. And I mean it completely.
The evening cools as the sun drops, and the whole crowd moves toward the park two blocks over where they set up for the fireworks. We find a patch of grass and spread out on the blanket Amy produces from the bag she's been carrying all day, and Cora immediately horizontal between me and Mark, her head on my leg and her feet in his lap.
Rosa leans against Gunner’s chest. Amy has her head on his shoulder. Around us, the town spreads out on the lawn with their chairs and blankets and coolers, and when the first firework goes up, Cora's whole face goes bright.
"That one was green," she informs Mark.
"I saw it,” he reaches out and grabs for her nose.
"That's my second favorite color. Orange is first."
"Obviously." He looks up and down at her outfit.
She laughs and turns back to the sky.
I lean back on my palms and watch the fireworks climb and break apart, and I'm aware of everything around us. Cora lays solidly against my leg, there are the sounds of the crowd, the low murmur of Gunner and Amy talking behind us, and Mark's hand, which at some point in the last ten minutes has found mine on the blanket and wrapped around it.
I look at his profile in the colored light. The way he watches the sky with Cora, answering her color commentary without missing a beat. The line of his jaw, the ease in his shoulders, the way he laughs when she says something particularly authoritative about the firework formations.
I am falling in love with this man.
The thought should scare me, but I don’t let it. Instead I lean into it, and allow myself to feel it completely. Truth be told it’s probably been there since he agreed to meet my daughter.
The finale goes up in a long, rolling string of overlapping explosions. Cora stands, tilting her head up to watch it properly, and Mark's hand tightens on mine. Once it’s done, we're packing up the blanket when I hear a voice I have spent two years training myself not to react to.
Fucking Derek.
He's twenty feet away, in the crowd filtering out of the park, a woman I don't recognize has her arm around his waist. He's laughing at something she said, and then his eyes sweep the crowd in our direction and land squarely on us.
First on me. Then on Cora.
And he looks away. Like he doesn’t know who the hell we are.
