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"Okay."

"Are you being careful with them?"

"What does that mean?"

She looked at me for a long time without blinking.

"I was there for your marriage, Alex. I watched the whole thing."

I started to say something. She held up her hand.

"When your father died, you stepped up and carried this family. You joined the fire service, made captain young, and gave everything to being dependable, to being the man he couldn't be." She put her hand on mine. "You were a wonderful son. You were a wonderful brother. I am grateful for what you did for me and for Erin, and I will never stop being grateful."

Her voice changed.

"But a husband is different." Her hand tightened on mine. "A husband doesn't just provide a home. He lives in it. A father doesn't just put food on the table. He sits at it. You gave Cheryl a beautiful house and you were never in it. You worked and worked and came home with nothing left to give, and she got the shell of a man who was too busy being reliable to be present."

Every word was true.

"Janine is different because there's a child. Whatever this is between you two, the stakes are higher than they were with Cheryl. A woman can walk away from a man who's absent. A child remembers." She turned to face me. "If you're going to be in Hazel's life, you have to be in it fully. You can't give her a piece of yourself and call it enough. Children know the difference."

I sat with it. The cold porch, the dark yard, my mother's hand covering mine.

"I know that now."

"Do you? Because the firehouse will always need you, Alex. There will always be another shift to pick up. And the moment things get hard at home, that station is going to feel like the easier place to be."

"I'm not going to do that to them."

"You didn't think you were doing it to Cheryl either."

I looked at the yard. She was right. I hadn't seen it with Cheryl until it was too late.

"I know why I did it," I said. "I know where it came from. And I'm telling you, I see it now."

She studied my face. Then she leaned over and kissed my temple, the same gesture she'd been using since I was twelve, and went inside.

I stayed on the porch. Hazel's voice carried from somewhere in the house. My mother was right. A husband lives in the home. A father sits at the table.

I'd been sitting at that table tonight. The question was whether I could keep doing it when the firehouse offered an easier version of being needed.

Hazel fell asleep in the car on the way home with a turkey-shaped paper craft in one hand and her cheek pressed against the window.

Getting her to bed was its own routine by now. I carried her upstairs, and Janine had the covers pulled back before I made it to the room. Blanket tucked, nightlight on, door halfway shut. We stood in the hallway for a second listening to her breathe.

"Thank you." She was looking at me in the hallway. "For showing up for us. We're not your responsibility, but you show up for us anyway. Every day." She smiled. "I had a great time tonight. Your family is wonderful, Alex. I don't know how you stayed away from them for so long."

"I don't either." I looked at her. "I can't promise I'll make it to every dinner. But I'm done skipping them."

The light from the kitchen reached the green of her eyes, the same green I'd been carrying since Edinburgh, and everything I'd been holding at arm's length for weeks was right there between us.

"Janine." I held her face in my hands. She didn't pull away. "After my divorce, I convinced myself I didn't deserve this. A table like that. People who wanted me there. I thought I'd had my chance and I'd blown it." I ran my thumb across her cheek. "Then I showed up to a school play because my sister wouldn't stop calling. And I found you. I think about what would have happened if I'd said no that night. If I'd picked up a shift instead. And I can't, because I can't picture my life without you and Hazel in it anymore."

She laughed and reached for the front of my shirt.

"I'm glad I agreed to play that princess."

I leaned down and kissed her. Her laughter dissolved in between our mouths as she pulled me closer. She tasted like Erin's cider and I wanted more. My arm wrapped around her waist and my hand slid under her shirt, finding the soft skin at the small of her back. She arched into my hand and made a sound against my mouth that almost ended me right there in the hallway.