Chapter 37
Becca
“Welcome to Somebody Said in Sweetbriar. If you’ve ever met a Barrett, then you know they don’t keep secrets. They keep scorecards.’”
I’d been to the Barrett house before.
Enough times over the years that I knew the driveway tilted slightly to the left, that the third porch step had a soft spot you learned to skip, and that the smell of Dahlia Barrett’s cooking reached the front walk before you ever made it to the door.
But I’d always arrived before as Levi’s best friend. As a known quantity with a clearly defined role. Tonight, I arrived as something else entirely.
Levi kept his hand over mine the whole drive, thumb tracing slow circles against my knuckles like he could feel the way my pulse had picked up.
He’d offered, twice, to tell them about the engagement first. And twice I’d said no, because somehow that felt worse—imagining the whole family rearranging their faces into polite surprise. I’d rather take the chaos directly.
“Stop thinking so loud,” Levi said.
“I’m not—”
“You are. I can tell. Your left knee is bouncing.”
I pressed my left knee flat against the seat.
He smiled without looking away from the road. “They’re going to love this.”
“They already know me,” I said. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Then what are you worried about?”
I looked out the window at the dark pine shapes sliding past. “Jude. He’s going to make a scene. I know it.”
Levi was quiet for exactly one beat. Then he let out a sigh. “Fair.”
The house was loud even before we stepped inside.
That was the first thing we noticed—that familiar Barrett noise, warm and layered, the sound of many loved ones talking loudly over the clinking of dishes and the sizzle of something in a pan.
A child’s laugh echoed from upstairs. The low rumble of what sounded like an argument about sports, or maybe the weather, or possibly both at the same time.
Levi pushed the door open without knocking—no Barrett kid knocked at Dahlia Barrett’s house, that much I knew. The warmth of it hit me immediately. Roast and herbs, and something sweet underneath.
We were three steps into the entryway when Jude appeared in the kitchen doorway.
He looked at Levi. He looked at me. He looked at our hands—specifically, at the ring on my left hand, which Levi was currently doing nothing to conceal.
The look on Jude’s face cycled through surprise, recognition, pure delight, and something I could only describe as the expression of a man who has been waiting for this moment for a very long time and intended to enjoy every second of it.
“MOM,” he bellowed, not breaking eye contact with me. “DAD. ASHER. VI. CADE. LILY. ROSE. HOLLY. GRAM.” A pause for breath. “GET IN HERE.”
“Jude—” Levi started.
“Nope.”
“I was going to—”
“I know what you were going to do, and it was going to take approximately twenty minutes and involve a speech. You’re welcome. Oh yeah, congratulations.”
The house erupted.
It wasn’t an orderly arrival. It was the Barrett family in full force—Dahlia coming in with a dish towel still over her shoulder, Ben a step behind her, Violet wiping her hands on her jeans, Holly following quickly behind her.
Asher ducking under the doorframe with his height, Cade cutting around him with a grin already forming, Lily and Rose arriving together the way they always did—identical twin creepy.
And in the back, moving at a pace that was entirely her own and radiating a composure that suggested she had known this moment was coming and had dressed accordingly, Rosemary.
Jude pointed at my left hand with the gravity of a man presenting evidence at a trial. “They’re engaged.”
For one breath, the room was completely silent.
Then Dahlia’s hands flew to her mouth, and she made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and crossed the room to me before I fully processed it was happening.
The hug was warm and immediate, the kind that didn’t require any preamble, and she smelled like floral perfume, and home, and every Sunday dinner I’d ever had here as a kid, and I had to blink fast against the tears forming at the back of my eyes.
“Finally,” she said into my hair, and it came out like a prayer.
Ben Barrett shook Levi’s hand—a grip that said everything that didn’t need to be said aloud—and then pulled him in, brief and solid, before turning to me with that quiet smile Levi had clearly inherited directly from him.
“Welcome,” he said simply. Like I’d been expected.
Like the seat that belonged to me at the table had always been set and was just waiting for me to fill it.
And then the chaos erupted.
Because somewhere in the middle of the congratulations and the overlapping voices, and at least one child appearing at knee height to investigate the commotion, an argument broke out.
Not a bad argument. A Barrett argument, which was apparently its own distinct category.
“I had October,” Cade said, arms crossed, already aggrieved.
“Yeah, but October of which year?” Lily said.
“This year—”
“That’s not what you wrote down. You wrote October, no year. That’s been disqualified for two years, and you know it,” Rose said, appearing from behind Violet and glancing up from her phone. “I’ve been maintaining this spreadsheet for years. Don’t even try to start an argument.”
“What—” I looked at Levi.
Levi looked like a man who desperately wanted to be somewhere else.
“There’s a bet,” Violet said cheerfully, settling herself on the couch cross-legged, the way she probably had since she was twelve. “There has been a bet for quite a while.”
“How long,” I asked, “is quite a while?”
The siblings exchanged a look.
“Asher started it,” Jude offered.
Asher, the oldest, raised both hands. “I started the pool. I did not set the terms. The terms evolved organically.”
“Organically,” Levi repeated flatly.
“You were in seventh grade,” Asher said. “And you looked at her like that—” He waved a hand in front of Levi’s face. “You’ve been looking at her like that ever since. Some things you just know are gonna happen.”
I felt the heat climb my neck and chose to focus very carefully on the dish towel still draped over Dahlia’s shoulder.
“So the bet,” I said, because apparently I was committed to this now, “has been running for—?”
“Well, the original pool technically had to be reset twice,” Rose said, showing me her phone with the efficiency of someone who had been documenting this for years.
“Once, when you two lost touch completely for a few months. Once when Travis came back into the picture—again.” A brief, pointed pause.
“That restart had a lot of opinions attached to it.”
“A lot of strongly-worded opinions,” Lily confirmed.
“I had this month,” Violet said. “Of this year. I want that noted.”
“This month isn’t over,” Jude said.
“It is for our purposes because she’s wearing the ring.” Violet looked at my hand with the satisfied expression of someone who had invested wisely and was watching the returns come in. “I want it noted.”
The argument about the terms and conditions of the Barrett family engagement pool continued around me—warm, ridiculous, and deeply affectionate.
Cade lobbied for a technicality while Jude cheerfully refused to grant one.
Lily and Holly whispered rapidly in a sidebar as Asher held his ground.
I stood in the middle of it all, Levi’s hand warm at my back, thinking this is what it sounds like when a family roots for you out loud, for years, with a documented spreadsheet.
I had not known how much I needed something like this in my life until exactly this moment.
The argument came to its natural conclusion at the dinner table, which is to say it didn’t conclude at all but was temporarily tabled in favor of pot roast and mashed potatoes.
I found myself sandwiched between Levi and Jude.
The conversation flowed in typical Barrett fashion—fast, layered, with a dozen threads running at once—and I slipped into it more easily than I expected.
I had known these people for years, even if only at the edges.
The difference now was that no one treated me like a guest.
Somewhere between passing the bread and Cade successfully arguing for a redo on grounds of ambiguous documentation, Rosemary set down her fork. She had clearly been listening to everything.
“You’ve been part of this family for a long time, Becca,” she said.
“Oh…” I replied. My heart pounding hard in my chest.
“I had the fifteenth of this month.” She reached into the front pocket of her cardigan, pulled out a small, creased piece of paper, and laid it on the table beside her plate. “Of this year. That’s tomorrow. As you can see, I’m clearly the winner.”
The table erupted.
“Gram—”
“That’s a future date—”
“The engagement happened before the fifteenth—”
“The ring is on the finger,” Rosemary said serenely.
“The engagement is official. The fifteenth is the nearest eligible date. I win.” She refolded the paper with finality and slipped it back into her pocket.
“I’ve had this one locked in for quite some time.
I was simply waiting for you two to cooperate. ”
“She’s right.” Rose held her phone up. “Gram wins. She’s the closest.”
Levi pressed his lips together, clearly fighting a laugh.
I didn’t bother fighting mine. I laughed, full and loud and surprised, and the sound carried over the noise of the table. Dahlia smiled across at me as if that was exactly the sound this house needed.
After dinner, while the children were rounded up for cleanup and car rides home, I slipped out to the back porch. The night air felt cool and carried the sharp scent of pine, with the faint rush of the river audible beyond the trees.
The door opened behind me. Levi stepped out and came to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder, both of us looking out into the dark.
“Too much?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and meant it. “Not even a little. I love them all. Especially you.”
He wrapped his arm around me, pulled me close, and pressed a kiss to my temple.
Inside, the voices rose again—Jude making some grand proclamation, Violet objecting, and Rosemary’s dry commentary cutting through them both. The warm, chaotic noise of a family that had been waiting, in its own loud and thoroughly documented way, for this night.
I leaned into Levi’s shoulder and let it all wash over me.
I was going to belong to all of this. I was becoming a Barrett.