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“Are the two of you planning on going anywhere this afternoon?” Mom asks when dad tops up her wine. “Your father and I had plans to go on the big wheel, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea with the weather.”
“It’s only a sprinkle of snow.” Dad chuckles.
He’s not the kind of person who gets deterred easily, not even by a snowstorm. When Laiken and I were kids, Dad would take the few snow days off work to have fun with us. He’s always been a hands-on kind of father, which meant Mom didn’t have to give up work.
“So, Cassidy,” Dad croons from the other end of the table. “What brought you to Budapest?”
“This storm,” she answers with a shrug, forking the remainder of her goulash around her plate. “I was meant to be spending the New Year in Cappadocia. I suppose fate had other ideas.”
“Fate, huh?” I nudge her shoulder with mine, and rest my arm on the back of her chair to stroke her shoulder softly.
“Fate or… whatever,” she whispers back.
“I told you I’d make you believe.”
With a dramatic sigh, Cassidy boops my nose. “Leif McAllister, you’ve shown me the magic of life.”
“Isn’t it epic, Cassidy Morgan?”
“If epic is the twin sister of annoying.”
She has no idea what these back-and-forths do to me. “Like courgette and cucumber.”
“Hmm,” she muses. “At least you used the right name.”
“No zucchini here, darling.”
“No.” She glances down at my lap. “You’re more of an aubergine type.”
A laugh burst from me. “I’ll show you later.”
“Leif said you’re a teacher,” Kami chimes in, taking everyone’s eyes off us for a second. “You must have a lot of patience to work with children.”
“It’s a common saying that you should never work with children and animals,” Mom adds with a light-hearted trill. With an almost forty-year career as a child psychologist under her belt, Mom’s worked with children most of her life. “I disagree. I’ll take the kids all day long.”
“Absolutely. I’ll take my children over animals and adults any given day. Although, teaching preschool is very different to teaching older years. The kind of mischief four-year-olds get up to isn’t comparable to the trouble pre-teens and teens can get into.”
“Funny you should say that.” Mom leans forward in her seat, her face lit up. “I was part of a study almost a decade ago now, where we monitored the correlation between early years education and later life adjustment.”
“Mom…” Laiken gives her the ‘oh-come-on’ look.
“You don’t get to control every conversation.” Kami shushes him with a flick to his ear.
Laiken makes a big show of getting in Kami’s face and biting the tip of her nose before he tells her, “We have a ‘no work talk’ rule at the dinner table. No one gets to break it, especially not the person who initiated it in the first place.”
Today is different, though. Seeing the way Cassidy mirrors Mom’s body language, waiting for her to go on, feeds the fullness taking over my heart. Everything about her is perfect for me, even if tricky at times.
“Ignore him,” Kami says, playfully pushing Laiken back into his seat. “He’s sleep deprived and grumpy.”
“I’m ignoring my pedantic spawn.”
Mom shoots him a teasing glare that Cassidy giggles at.
Whether she knows it or not, she belongs here with me and them.
“Working with children has to have the most job satisfaction,” Mom says.
“Obviously, my job makes me biased,” Cassidy says, looking over her shoulder at me with a smile when I smooth my hand down her back and rest it above her ass when she leans forward over her crossed arms on the edge of the table. “But I can’t imagine doing anything else. There’s no job out there as constantly rewarding or as diverse.”
