I shake my head, swallowing a mouthful of too-hot soup that burns all the way down. “No. We lost touch. I didn’t exactly send out birth announcements to everybody I used to know.”
He nods slowly, accepting that.
“She’s getting the advanced McCoy course,” he says. “Weather, chores, stray runaways…”
Clay snorts. “Storm’ll be gone by New Year’s.”
“Maybe,” Mom says, glancing toward the window where snow still smears the world into gray. “Snow like this has a way of hanging around longer than you think.”
Nobody argues with her. About the weather, or anything else she might be talking about.
Boone nudges my elbow with his. “You doing all right?”
I could lie.Say yeah, fine, I’m good,and swallow it all the way down as I always do.
Instead, I stare into my bowl for a long second, watching the steam curl and fade.
“I don’t know yet,” I say finally. “Feels strange. Good and not good at the same time.”
He huffs under his breath.
“Seems about right.” He takes another spoonful, chews, and swallows. “If you need to get out of your own head for a bit, I can find a gate that mysteriously needs fixing.”
“Gonna need a gate to mysteriously break first,” I say.
He grins. “I know a guy.”
I shove his shoulder with mine, half a shove, half a thanks.
Out in the living room, Lila laughs at something Faith says. The sound threads through the doorway and lands right under my breastbone.
I tell myself it’s just been a long day. Just storm stress and too little sleep, and the shock of the past walking back into my kitchen.
But the truth is, standing there a few minutes ago with snow still melting down my collar, watching my daughter lean against Faith, my heart didn’t just kick. It remembered something.
And now I’m not sure if the walls I’ve built are as solid as I thought.
CHAPTER NINE
Faith
December 26th
By the timedinner rolls around, I’m pretty sure my bones are made of other people’s noise.
The good kind, mostly. The warm, layered kind that comes from kids and casseroles and brothers arguing about nothing. But still… noise.
It’s a lot for someone whose last few years have been spent making other people’s events look effortless, then retreating to a tiny apartment that never actually felt like mine.
Here, everything belongs to someone. Every chair, every fork, every dent in the table. I am very aware that I am the one thing in this house that doesn’t.
“Faith, honey, you want to slide down a bit? Make room for my heathen children?” Rose asks, balancing Wyatt on one hip and a basket of biscuits on the other.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say automatically, even though she’s only a couple of years older than me, and scoot along the bench until my hip bumps the thick center leg.
The McCoy dinner table is… crowded. That’s the only word for it. In a nice restaurant, a table this size would hold maybe eight people and a tasteful centerpiece. Here, we’ve got ten bodies crammed around it and enough food to feed half of Buckhorn, plus a centerpiece that’s just a jar of pinecones and a plastic reindeer that Ellie insisted on “because he’s the boss of Christmas.”
I’m wedged between Rose and Dallas. Of course I am. The universe has jokes.
