Chapter Forty-Nine
FIVE YEARS LATER
Christmas Day
Breanna
I used to picture this room empty.
When I bought this house, the thing I looked forward to most was sitting at the breakfast nook drinking coffee by a stained-glass window. I made peace with a small, contained life.
I was so wrong.
It's barely past seven on Christmas morning, and the house is anything but small, contained, or quiet.
I'm standing next to the same window, bathed in the rays of colored light, and looking at a living room buried in torn paper and ribbon, and I have a mug of cocoa warming my hands because somebody made it for me before I was even downstairs.
That somebody is currently sprawled on the rug, laying on his stomach with his head resting on his arms, in flannel pants, letting our daughter braid his long hair while she narrates everything she got, and he's saying "mm-hm" in all the right places with his eyes half-closed.
"Mom." Koda's now deep voice comes down the stairs ahead of him. Fifteen now, and taller than me by more than a head, which happened sometime in the last year when I wasn't looking. His body is filled out from spending so much time with Mato at the gym and competing in MMA tournaments.
He thumps down in a hoodie and work-out pants with his long black hair hanging down his front over his chest, Biscuit at his heels, now grown into a sixty-pound shadow that sleeps on his bed every night and follows him room to room. “Do you know where the screwdriver set is? The little one.”
"It's where you left it, by the tree." I lift my cup and point it toward the Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.
"Okay. Thanks." He goes to find it. Biscuit goes too.
Mom. He says it now like he's always said it; they both do.
No ceremony, just a kid hollering for his mother about a screwdriver on Christmas morning.
I remember the first time he said it; it was a few months after the adoption paperwork was finalized almost four years ago.
I had to turn around and find something to do at the sink so he wouldn't see my face and the tears on my cheeks.
I never made a thing of it. It just quietly became true, like all the most important things, and now it's the most ordinary and used word in this house, and I will never, as long as I live, fully get over the sound of it.
I watch his broad shoulders as he digs through torn paper to find them. He’s such a good-looking kid. My kid. And he’ll be a gorgeous man. With my cocoa in front of my face, I sigh and think of how lucky I am.
Mato pushes onto his side and rests his head on his hand, catching my eye across the wreckage of the living room.
He gives me that look; the one that says I see you having a moment over there, so I lift my cocoa at him, busted.
I don't bother hiding the wet in my eyes, because I stopped hiding things from him a long time ago. I think I fall for him more every day.
"We're going to be late," I tell the room. "Everybody's expecting us by ten, and we still have to load the truck."
Nobody moves with any urgency. Nova ties off the braid in Mato's hair with a hair tie from her wrist and pats it, satisfied. Koda found the screwdriver set and is already taking apart something I don’t want to know about. Biscuit has stolen a bow and is ripping it to shreds next to him.
I drink my cocoa by the window I once thought I'd drink at alone, and I let us be late by a few minutes.
The drive to the ranch takes twenty minutes, the bed of the truck loaded with gifts under a tarp.
The fields are silver with frost. Mato has one hand on the wheel and the other holding mine on the console, his thumb moving slowly over my knuckles, the way it's done for five years, the way I hope it does until we're old.
When we crest the rise and the main house comes into view, there are trucks parked three-deep in the drive and smoke coming up from the chimneys into the cold blue sky.
We walk through the door with our arms full, and the noise greets us like a warm wall.
It's bedlam, the good kind. Sixteen grandkids and counting, ranging from Lainey Rai at seventeen, too cool for all of it and secretly not, down to the babies, Estella and Elliot, both turned one this year and both currently being passed around like footballs.
Somewhere a toy is making a sound it was not designed to make.
The whole downstairs smells like coffee and cinnamon, and the ham Marley has in the oven.
"Bre's here!" Kinley yells from somewhere, and it’s echoed by a few other people, and then I'm being relieved of my packages and hugged and pulled into the middle of it.
Dad's in his chair by the fire, still strong as an ox, two heart attacks be damned, the doctors gave up trying to slow him down years ago, with a lapful of the littlest ones and Rhys and Kinley's three swarming the arm of the chair.
He catches my eye over the top of a toddler's head and winks, and I smile at him.
It's all here, the whole loud sprawl of us.
Gray, going gray himself now and not minding it, refereeing some dispute between his Dawson and Mason's Beckett while Elly and his youngest, Ella, decorate him with stickers while he pretends not to notice.
Mason and Sloane in the kitchen doorway, her hand on the small of his back, and their youngest Weston riding his shoulders.
Marley, with flour on her shirt and a wooden spoon, and Jax, who's currently flat on the floor letting little Luka use him as terrain.
Tucker and Nora wrangling their three stair-step babies, Nora pregnant again and pretending she isn't tired.
Kinley, with Estella on her hip, sharp-tongued as ever, softer than she'll admit.
Everyone partnered. Everyone surrounded. The quiet, careful people we all used to be, buried under this beautiful avalanche of family we built.
And in the middle of it, Koda's already gone, swallowed up by the older cousins, Beckett dragging him off to show him something.
My guarded boy, who once stood between horrible people and his sister, now is just one more kid in a loud house who knows, all the way down to his bones, that no one here will ever hurt him.
Nova's found the twins, Sofi and Niki, who adopted her as a little sister years ago, and the three of them vanish up the stairs in a flurry of hair and giggles.
Mato comes to stand beside me with two mugs of cocoa, handing me one, his other arm coming around my back.
I lean into him and survey it all: the kids, the noise, my father holding court by the fire, the people I love stacked into every corner of this house that’s held this family through everything.
"You good?" he asks, low, just for me.
"I'm good. I was just thinking about how lucky I am."
Pressing his lips to my temple, he doesn't say anything, because he doesn't have to. He's the one who taught me, like water wearing down stone. He just stood at the edges of my life, patiently, and waited me out, and never went silent again, not once, not in five years.
If you’d been here in the beginning, before the grandkids, before the added spouses, you would never believe that this house was anything but chaos. I don’t think it will ever be quiet again.