Page 389 of Romeo

I didn’t look at him. I didn’t have to.

The service moved on, voices low against the wind, but my attention drifted through the people gathered around us. Some grief was obvious. Other faces gave away nothing until a hand settled on a shoulder or someone moved half a step closer to the person beside them.

That was when I understood why the crowd felt so different from any funeral I had known.

The person being buried had reached every one of them somehow.

Maybe through years of friendship. Maybe through a single choice. Maybe only through someone else whose life had been changed first. Whatever the path, it had brought all of us here.

Even me.

I had never met the person beneath those flowers, yet pieces of my life existed because people rarely touched only the person standing directly in front of them. A decision could travel farther than anyone intended. So could kindness. So could cruelty.

So could sacrifice.

I had heard that word enough over the past year that it should have lost some of its weight.

It hadn’t.

Maybe because I had finally begun to understand that sacrifice wasn’t always the grand moment people remembered afterward. Sometimes it was quieter. A choice no one applauded. Years surrendered without knowing what would come from them. Loving someone enough to accept that you might never get back what you gave.

My gaze found Angel before I consciously went looking for him.

A few months ago, seeing him would have made every thought in my head tangle together. Now I knew the way he drank his coffee and that his text messages were usually four words long unless he was irritated, in which case they somehow became even shorter. I knew he could sit across a room from me for an hour without demanding conversation and that when I finally asked him a question, he never rushed the answer.

I still called him Angel.

He was still a nomad.

For now, that was enough.

Banshee stood nearby, easier to spot because subtlety seemed to be a personal insult to him. Getting to know him had been different. Louder. Faster. He had somehow decided almost immediately that eighteen years of missed uncle duties could be corrected through excessive phone calls, inappropriate jokes, and sending me things I never asked for.

Including a puppy.

Then there was Kyllian.

She had surprised me most.

There was no instant sisterhood between us, no magical recognition because we shared blood. We had started with awkward messages and careful conversations, both of us trying not to ask too much too quickly. Somewhere along the way, careful had become easier. She sent me pictures now without explaining why. I sent them back. Sometimes she told me about Kaylah and Kinsley, and sometimes we talked for an hour without mentioning the past at all.

I liked those conversations best.

There were days when the size of my family still startled me.

Not because any of them had replaced what came before. Angel existed without taking anything from the father who raised me. Banshee had found a place beside Frank and Georgie instead of pushing them out. Kyllian being my sister didn’t require me to suddenly know how to be hers.

They were simply becoming mine in their own ways.

I had spent so many years bracing for the next person to disappear that I hadn’t known what to do when people started arriving instead.

Jasper did.

He always seemed to.

His shoulder brushed mine as the wind shifted, and I leaned closer without thinking.

The final words were being spoken near the grave when I noticed the man beyond the crowd.