"Of course you were."
He brings his coffee around the island and stops in front of me, close enough that I have to look up to find his face. He tucks my hair back with one hand, unhurried. His thumb brushes my jaw the way it does.
"You sleep okay?" he asks.
"Better than okay," I tell him.
He nods like that's the answer he expected. He kisses my forehead once and goes back to whatever he was doing, easy and without ceremony. I stand against the counter with my coffee and watch the morning move through the kitchen windows.
This is what I have always wanted.
This exact thing. Coffee and a child running barefoot toward a horse and a man who tucks my hair back like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I was so careful for so long.
I'm glad I finally stopped.
They come on Sunday. All the McCallisters.
Nobody organizes it. Nobody sends a message saying show up at noon. It just happens the way things happen with this family. Someone pulls up the drive and then another truck follows and before long the porch is full and the kitchen smells like Summer's cooking. Hadley is somewhere in the middle of all of it talking at full volume.
I used to watch families like this from the outside.
I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. I thought I was just being independent. Self-sufficient. The woman who didn't need a village because she'd built her own walls thick enough to substitute for one.
Turns out walls aren't the same thing as a foundation.
Summer finds me first, the way she always does, and she takes my left hand without asking. She looks at the ring and then looksat me with the expression of a woman who is genuinely happy for someone else's happiness without a single complicated feeling underneath it.
"Finally," she says.
"He waited until the right moment," I tell her.
"Jace McCallister has been waiting for the right moment his whole life," she says. "I'm glad it showed up."
Addie comes through the door behind her with Luke, quiet and warm the way she always is. She embraces me the way she does everything, like she means it completely and isn't in any hurry to stop. Quinn comes last, still carrying that satisfied expression she's worn since the night she made the call on Dusty. When she sees the ring she raises an eyebrow at Wade across the kitchen.
Wade shrugs like he's known for a week.
He probably has.
The afternoon fills itself the way good afternoons do, without effort and without agenda. The kids chase each other across the back pasture while the adults drift between the porch and the kitchen and the long stretch of grass where the men eventually end up doing whatever it is men do when they're standing around outside pretending they're not just enjoying each other's company.
I sit on the porch steps with Summer, Addie and Quinn, and the conversation moves the way it moves between women who have been through things together, easy and honest and occasionally very funny.
I watch Jace across the yard with Hadley and two of the other kids, laughing at something Wyatt just said while he pretends not to notice Emma trying to climb onto his back like he's a jungle gym. His hat is pushed back and the late afternoon light catches the edge of his smile when he looks toward the house.
Summer appears beside me with two glasses of sweet tea.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm allowed," I answer, and she laughs because she knows exactly where I got that line and doesn't say so.
I look around at the yard full of McCallisters, at the kids and dogs and the trucks in the drive and the house behind us holding all of it. I feel the size of what this is without needing to name every piece of it.
This is the family I didn't plan for.
The one that showed up anyway.
