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Art laughed, then stopped when he saw how serious I was.

“What are you talking about? You’ve been incredible! You’ve got Viv with you all day in the shop, and you’ve picked Merry up from aftercare every day this week because I’ve gotten stuck in bridge traffic. I found a workaround, by the way. You won’t have to do that anymore.”

“Oh, thank you for that,” I replied, a fresh layer of guilt adding itself to the pile. It wasn’t so much that I minded picking Merry up from his program. It was that it always seemed to coincide with a batch of cookies needing to be taken out of the oven.

I dropped my face into my hands, horrified to find that I was suddenly crying. “I wanted this to be easy. But I’m so bad at it,” I whispered, hiding my face as the unexpected truth I hadn’t even voiced to myself came popping out. “Viv hates me, and Merry never stops talking, and there’s just so much laundry! With the shop ramping up, I just don’t see how I can handle it all!”

“Come here,” Art said, chuckling softly and wrapping his arm around me to pull me against him. “First, I keep telling you that you don’t have to do the laundry. I’ve got it.” His arm tightened when I sobbed in response. “Second, you’re not letting me down, Meg. That would imply that I have expectations that you’re not meeting which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Did you think you were going to open your doors to one near stranger and his two kids, one of whom is enough of a ‘troubled teen’”—he rolled his eyes as he made air quotes around the words—“that her school didn’t hesitate for a moment to sign off on letting her do remote school, and that there wouldn’t be a significant adjustment period? I’ve known these kids since day one, and I’m winging it every day.”

“But at least you get it right when you wing it! He almost convinced me the other day that his normal bedtime is 10 p.m.”

Art snorted. “He’ll make a very convincing lawyer one of these days.”

“Only if he leaves the frog outside the courtroom,” I muttered, still a little bitter about how hard the kids had laughed when I’d shrieked the day he pulled one out of his pocket and held it out proudly.

“Meg, I fought for the right to have these kids with me full-time. I signed up for this. You didn’t,” he said, cupping my face and tipping it up to kiss my lips gently before resting his forehead against mine. “They aren’t your responsibility. I’m grateful for anything you choose to do for or with us, but please believe me when I say that I have zero expectations. From the moment I realized how much I was missing out on, I’ve wanted to be their primary parent. I’ve got this. Trust me.”

Burying my fists in his shirt, I dropped my head against his chest and wrestled with the sudden unease gripping my chest. It took me a me a moment to identify it as rejection, which was absurd. He was offering me an open-ended invitation to participate in their life on my terms. It was the opposite of rejection. He rubbed my back silently until I lifted my head.

Sensing that I hadn’t been entirely forthcoming, he brushed the hair from my face and asked gently, “What else is going on, sweetheart?”

I took a deep, shuddering breath and shared another truth I hadn’t voiced even to myself. “I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m terrified that I’m going to disappoint everyone. Fiona. The customers. But especially you. I don’t know what anyone expects of me, and it is freaking me out. Whenever I didn’t anticipate what Jim wanted from me, he’d stop talking to me. And all that silence wasn’t fine, Art. It was never, ever fine.”

I swiped at the tears still streaming down my face, noticing as I did how much more alike Viv and I were than she’d ever want to know.

Art pulled me into a tight hug, released me so he could look me in the eye.

“Meg, I am beyond sorry that ever happened to you. You should never have been forced to be responsible for his emotions. That said, I am a grown man who’s been in therapy for a long time and who’s been managing his own emotions for a lot longer than that. I neither need nor want you to do it for me.”

He lifted my chin with his finger and kissed the frown wrinkling my forehead tenderly. “This might be hard for you to accept, but I don’t need you to shield me from your emotions either. I do not care if you get so angry you break a plate. Or rather, I care because I hate to see you in pain, but your emotions, no matter how intense, do not scare me. I want every part of you, not just the easy, happy bits.”

“Is that what we’re calling those now?” I asked, unable to let the tension keep growing without saying something to lighten things a little.

He grinned down at me, but then his eyes grew serious again.

He flipped his wishing stone over in his hand a few times. “I don’t want you to manage me or fix me, Meg. I just want you to be real and be here with me.”

My heart caught in my throat as he turned and threw the rock into the ocean. It soared far beyond where his pebbles had hit the water, and landed cleanly, causing a beautiful series of ripples to spread farther and farther out, each one like a knife to my chest.

I wanted to believe him so much it hurt, but when I opened my mouth to tell him the real reason I’d been banging around the kitchen, I still couldn’t do it.

Which was fine. In the grand scheme of things, who cared that he hadn’t checked with me about the Instagram account?

It’s fine. Everything is going to be fine. I gripped the wishing stone in my pocket so tightly my fingers ached, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull it out and cast the wish. What if that was just too much for one little stone’s magic to manifest?

TWENTY-ONE

“Ye would not believe the day I’ve had!” Shona said as she pushed the shop door open with her hip, the tray of coffee cups in her hands steady despite the awkward movement.

Art jumped up from where he was tightening the base of a table leg to hold the door for her.

“Thanks,” Shona said to him, flashing him a grateful smile.

“Not on that one,” he said as she moved to put the tray down on the table he’d been adjusting. “It’s not quite there yet.” He pressed down on the edge to demonstrate how unstable it was and laughed when she winced. “That one is better,” he added, gesturing to the next table over.

“Right, then. Get this,” Shona continued as though she’d never stopped sharing her story.

“Thank you,” I said with a happy, grateful sigh when she handed me a cup without interrupting her tale. It felt good to sit down even for a moment.