22. Tyler
TYLER
The house is absolute chaos, and I've never been happier.
Emma and Chase rolled in on Wednesday evening around six. Emma, whom I've known longer than almost anyone, who cried on the phone when I told her about Harper and showed up almost straight away to help me not fall apart. Chase, her husband, is calm, whereas Emma is motion.
Their kids pile out behind them. Ethan, three, with Chase's brown hair, Emma's green eyes, and absolutely no concept of volume control. Sofia, just one, blonde, and clearly Emma's daughter, toddling after her brother on unsteady legs.
Diane arrived an hour later, Emma and Jackson's mum, with enough food to stock a restaurant. Maya and Jackson showed up last, Maya already directing kitchen traffic before she'd taken her coat off, and Jackson going straight for Emma to wrap his younger sister in a hug.
Now it's Thanksgiving morning, and my rental house is full of noise, children, family, and something I didn't know I was missing.
Ethan is currently using my couch cushions to build a fortress with structural ambitions that exceed his engineering skills, and Sofia is completely fascinated by Harper, reaching for her constantly with little grabby hands.
"Gentle, Sofia," Emma says for the fifteenth time. "Harper's smaller than you."
"Baby," Sofia announces, patting Harper's head slightly too firmly.
Harper doesn't seem to mind. She stares at Sofia with wide blue eyes, as if she's never seen anything so interesting in her life.
An hour later, the kitchen is controlled chaos. Diane directs from the stove, Emma preps vegetables, and Nora helps with both while also watching all three kids through the doorway. I've been assigned potato duty, which I'm executing with the same commitment I bring to hockey.
Chase is on the living room floor with Ethan and the fortress. Jackson is on the couch with his phone, which Maya periodically confiscates for being antisocial.
"Tyler, I need you to peel potatoes," Diane calls out. "Actually, peel them. Not just wave the peeler near them."
"I peeled the last ones—"
"You left the skins on."
"Those were rustic."
Maya comes in with Harper, who immediately reaches for me. "Your turn. I need both hands."
I take Harper with one arm and keep peeling with the other, which is a skill I have now, and Chase looks impressed from the floor.
"How are you doing that?"
"Practice."
The morning is full of cooking, kid-wrangling, noise, and the particular warmth of a house that's actually being used.
Nora and I keep ending up in the same space, moving around each other in the easy choreography we've built over the past few months.
She reaches for the flour at the same time I do, and our hands brush.
She passes behind me in the narrow kitchen, and her hand settles briefly on my lower back to let me know she's there.
I hand her measuring spoons without being asked.
She moves my coffee mug before I knock it over.
I forget we have an audience until I catch Emma watching us with a particular expression.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing." Her smile gets wider. "You two are just very coordinated."
"We live together. We've worked out how to navigate a kitchen."
"Sure. That's definitely what that is."
Sugar cookies in the afternoon. Diane's decision is unanimously supported, and the table is covered in newspaper and bowls of frosting and approximately seventeen kinds of sprinkles.
Harper is in her high chair at the head of the table, Sofia in her booster seat, Ethan kneeling on a regular chair, and announcing plans for the best cookies ever. Nora ends up next to me, Harper between us.
Ethan's turkey is structurally ambitious. Chase’s is secretly better, but he lets Ethan believe otherwise. Emma's is a perfect little maple leaf. Nora's are actual works of art, with clean lines, deliberate design, and evidence of someone who takes even cookie decorating seriously.
Mine looks like it was produced by someone operating under significant pressure.
"That's supposed to be a soccer ball?” Nora asks.
"It's abstract."
"It's a circle with some marks on it."
"That's a soccer ball.”
She's laughing; I'm watching her laugh instead of watching my cookie, and Harper somehow gets frosting on her hands and is delighted about it.
We both reach for the orange sprinkles at the same time.
Our hands collide over the container, and then neither of us moves.
Her fingers are touching mine. I can feel her pulse, or maybe that's mine, I can't tell anymore. She looks up at me, hazel eyes wide, and the whole table might as well not exist.
I can see Emma grinning in my peripheral vision.
Maya has her eyebrows raised.
Even Diane has a soft, knowing look.
Nora pulls her hand back first, grabbing the sprinkles and focusing very intently on her leaf-shaped cookie. I do the same.
"Uncle Tyler," Ethan announces, "you're doing it wrong."
"What am I doing wrong?"
"Footballs aren't blue."
"This is a special blue football."
"That's not a thing."
"It is now."
The cookie decorating continues, with Harper eventually getting her own small cookie to investigate, the table becoming a disaster of frosting, sprinkles, and happy noise.
Dinner is perfect. The turkey is golden, everything is warm, there are too many people around my dining table, and it's the best thing that's happened in this house since Harper arrived.
Our feet keep finding each other under the table, mine and Nora's. Neither of us comments on it.
After dinner, Emma insists on family photos. She lines everyone up in configurations: the kids together, the couples, the whole group.
"Tyler. Nora. Harper," she calls. "Your turn."
"We're not—" Nora starts.
"You're family. Come here."
So we do. I'm holding Harper, Nora's standing next to me with her hand on my shoulder, and Emma takes photo after photo.
"You look perfect," she says, showing us the screen.
We do. We look like what we keep pretending we're not.
By nine, everyone’s settled. Harper’s in her nursery. Emma and Chase have Nora’s room with the kids, and Diane has mine. Jackson and Maya are at their hotel.
Which leaves Nora and me, both downstairs, with sleeping bags on opposite sides of the living room.
We spend an hour doing dishes in comfortable silence, our usual rhythm, everything feeling slightly too warm and too close given what's happened today. The sprinkles. The hand. The way Emma looked at us.
My heart hasn't quite settled back into its normal rhythm since the kitchen, and every time her arm brushes mine as she reaches for a glass, I feel it in my fingertips. That low electric hum that's been getting harder to ignore.
"Should we talk about it?" Nora asks, drying a bowl.
"About what?"
She gives me a look. "About the sprinkles."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Tyler."
"I really don't know what you mean."
She almost smiles. "Okay."
We finish cleaning, and she heads for the sleeping bags.
I stand in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the dark backyard, the kitchen light making a warm square on the grass.
I need to talk to Emma.
Not because I want to. But because I have to, before I can talk to anyone else.
She's still up when I knock on the door frame of the kitchen around eleven. Chase and the kids are asleep, but Emma has come down for water and is sitting at the kitchen table with her phone.
She looks up and puts her phone down.
"I wondered how long," she says.
"How long, what?"
"How long before you came to find me. We've been here two days, Tyler. You haven't taken your eyes off her for more than ten minutes at a time."
I sit. I don't know where to start, so I just say it.
"I'm in love with her."
Emma's expression doesn't change. She just nods once, like this isn't news.
"How long?" she asks.
"I don't know exactly when. It crept up on me." I look at my hands on the table. "I kept telling myself it was the proximity, the situation, the fact that she's been here for all of it. But it's not that. It's her."
Emma is quiet for a moment.
"Does she know?"
"She knows something. I've been—not hiding it very well, apparently."
"Tyler, everyone who's been in this house for two days knows." Her voice is gentle. “Ethan asked me yesterday, ‘Why does Uncle Tyler look at her like that?’”
I press my face into my hands.
"What are you scared of?" Emma asks.
I look up at her. This is the part I've been carrying for as long as I can remember, the thing underneath everything else.
"I ruined your life," I say. "I hurt Jackson. I nearly got Chase—" My voice breaks. "And now I'm here, and I'm in love with someone who doesn't know any of that, who thinks she's falling for a good man. And I'm not—I'm not sure I'm a good man, Em."
Emma is quiet for a long moment.
When she speaks, her voice is very steady.
"You didn't ruin my life."
"I—"
"Listen to me. You made mistakes. You hurt people I love, including me." She says it plainly, no drama in it, the way Emma has always said hard things.
We have history, Emma and I, years of it, the kind that doesn't disappear even when you've both moved on and built different lives. She knows what I did in Pinewood because she was part of it.
"Those things happened, they were real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
" She leans forward. "But Tyler. You are not the sum of your worst moments.
Neither is anyone. And I know you. I've known you for years.
The man I know isn't the person who did those things.
The man I know is the one who's been up at three in the morning for months learning how to be a father to a baby he didn't even know existed. "
My eyes are burning. I look at the table.
"You're good," Emma says quietly. "You've always been good. You just forgot it for a while. You got lost." A pause. "And I think Nora found you."
I can't answer. My throat is too tight.
"Chase doesn't blame you," she says. "Not for what put him in that hospital bed.
He's told me that more than once. He knows you went after Jackson, not him—he knows when he threw himself between you and Jackson, he was choosing to do that, and he knows the guy who actually hit him was the one whose name we don't say in this house.
" She pauses. "Chase isn't saying you didn't start it.
He's saying you didn't end it. He's saying he made a choice to step in and he'd make it again, and he's tired of watching you carry his injury like you were the one who put him on the ice.
He knows you've lived with the guilt of it, and that's punishment enough.
" She reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine.
"Tyler. Forgive yourself. Please. You can't love someone properly when you're still serving a sentence you gave yourself.”
I'm crying. I don't mean to, but I am, and I can't seem to stop.
"She doesn't know about it," I say. "About you. About Chase. About Jackson. About Maya. None of it."
"Then tell her. When the time is right." Emma squeezes my hand. "She's not going to leave because of any of that. I promise you. I've watched her with you for two days. Whatever she feels for you, it isn't going anywhere."
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.
"I'm scared," I say. "Of wanting this and ruining it."
"You're going to need to decide," Emma says gently, "if you're going to keep being afraid of yourself, or if you're going to let yourself have something good." She stands, patting my shoulder once. "I love you. And I'm rooting for you both."
She goes back upstairs.
I sit at the kitchen table for a long time in the dark, thinking about what she said. About forgiveness, and the difference between who I was and who I've been trying to become.
I think about Nora, asleep in a sleeping bag in my living room, not knowing any of it, looking at me like I'm worth looking at.
Eventually, I go back to the living room. The lamp is off. I can hear her breathing in the dark, slow and even. Asleep.
I crawl into my sleeping bag, lie on my back, and stare at the ceiling.
"Ty?"
Her voice is quiet. She's not asleep.
"Yeah, Red?”
"You okay?"
I think about how to answer that. About Emma's hand on mine on the table. About the part of me that's been trying to put something down for years and finally—maybe—has somewhere to put it.
"I meant what I said today," I tell her. "At the park."
A long pause.
"I know," she says. "I'm terrified."
"Me too."
The quiet settles.
"Goodnight, Ty," she says eventually.
"Goodnight, Red."
I lie on my back, stare at the ceiling, and think about what Emma said.
Let yourself have something good.
And for the first time, I think I might actually be able to.