Page 31 of Maldives & Mistletoe

Lily came around the side of the hut to find her husband chasing after a laughing Joe while still keeping hold of a squirming Cory under his arm like a football. Nobody was getting in any trouble, it seemed. They were all laughing like there was no tomorrow. Including little Cory who didn’t seem to have any problem with being tucked under his father’s arm while Damian chased after Joe.

“Get back here, Joe!”

“No tickles, Da, no!”

Lily hung back just out of sight, so she could watch the three of them play. There was something about all her boys being together and having fun that made her smile. She hoped, as the years went by and these little ones of hers got older, that they still took time out to do exactly this. Have fun with each other. She wanted them to never take life too seriously. To find the good in even the bad. To live.

After all, hadn’t the rest of them suffered and sacrificed enough so that these kids—this next generation of Outfit kids—wouldn’t ever have to?

She thought so.

Sometimes, in moments like this when she had the chance to watch from afar, Joe and Cory really reminded her of Theo and Dino. Not that she remembered her brothers at that age, because she didn’t. But there was something in the way they looked, and how they acted with one another that just hit the feeling of it right on the head. Like a memory she could feel, but couldn’t see in her mind.

It made her miss her oldest brother a great deal. She wished he could be here to see her kids grow up the way he watched her grow up. She never talked about it with Damian, or even her brother because well, Theo never asked. Maybe she just wasn’t ready to have that conversation, either.

Wounds like those healed, sure, but they were still sore to the touch.

Lily glanced upward—at the sky, to find the heavens out of reach. She supposed … as long as Dino was happy, then the rest didn’t matter. He was just another one of them who had suffered, and so, she knew he was another one who needed to have his peace.

Simple as that.

It was only Damian catching Joe finally with a triumphant whoop that brought her out of her musings. Both of her sons’ laughter filled up the yard, high and breathless. It skipped over the sand to her spot, filling her heart with a happiness like nothing before as Damian got both boys to the sand, and tickled one with each hand.

They had rules, though.

They were teaching boundaries.

The second the boys said no or stop, their father did just that. Because how would they ever learn to respect someone else’s body when as a child—even with something as simple as tickling—they had been taught their body wouldn’t be respected?

Damian scooped up both boys, and found the closest spot he could sit down with them. That just happened to be a log they’d all been using as a makeshift bench. Joe sat on one side of his father trying to catch his breath and grinning all the while, and Cory sat on the other side, smiling up at his dad like his whole world revolved around Damian.

Lily bet it did revolve around Damian, too.

Damian picked Cory up to set him in his lap, and Joe moved a little closer to his father as well. It struck Lily silent for a moment as she looked at her boys—one lighter-haired, and the other darker.

Day and night, really.

One quiet, the other, loud and proud.

She slipped the phone out of the pocket of her shawl as she came around the corner, and her three boys looked her way with wide smiles. She already had the phone up and ready to take a picture, her thumb hovering over the button to capture the perfect image in front of her.

“Don’t move,” she told Damian, “and keep them smiling for me.”

Throughout their entire vacation, she had not been able to get one really good picture of the three of them together. Cory was always moving too fast, or Joe was too interested in something else.

Kids were fun that way, she supposed.

But this here …

Perfect.

Lily took the picture, and smiled as she peered over the captured image of her boys.

“Best Christmas present ever.”