Epilogue Bring Him Home #2
Wade did not ask me to lay Carter down. Wade felt like Micah laughing upstairs. Like Julian’s lips on mine every morning. Like family dinners and loud cousins and a man who saw me clearly enough to know I could carry myself, and loved me enough to carry things with me anyway.
I was not trading one self for another. I was keeping the good. My strength and my survival. And I was adding the new. My softness and surrender. The family I had chosen and been chosen by.
Carter-Wade meant I could be both.
Strong and soft.
Independent and held.
Capable and covered.
I would always be Carter. But I was Wade now too.
There was a time in my life when nobody’s coming to save you had been the truest thing I knew. And I won’t pretend there aren’t seasons when a woman needs that truth. Needs it to get up, wipe her face, feed her child, pay the bills, make the calls, and survive the day.
That truth had saved me more than once. Nobody was coming to live my life for me. Nobody was coming to make me less responsible for myself, or my son, or the woman I still wanted to become.
But somebody had come to stand inside that life with me. Somebody had come to hold what I could not keep holding alone. Somebody had come, not to save me, but to love me through the parts of myself I had built just to survive.
I still feel that old Alyssa sometimes. The one who knew how to survive anything and trust almost nothing. I love her for getting me here. I love her for carrying on while no one carried her. I love her for not giving up when disappearing would have been easier.
But I don’t need to live as her anymore. I can be somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife, somebody’s home, and still belong fully to myself.
So I let Julian hold me. I let his hand spread wide over my back. I let him breathe into my hair and make room for the fear and the joy and the life we’d made out of everything that tried to break us.
For once, I didn’t brace for the fall.
I stood there and let myself be covered by a love I no longer had to earn by being strong enough not to need it.
julian
I brought it to the table on a Sunday, at Zion and Taryn’s house, with everyone there.
The last time this subject came up, I’d handed down a decision and walked out the door before anybody could protest. I’d made the call alone, deciding I was the only one allowed to carry it.
I wasn’t that man anymore. It had cost me years and nearly cost me Alyssa to stop being him.
“I want to talk to y’all about something,” I said, when dinner was done. “I want to say it, and I want all of you to sit with it, and then I want us to figure it out together. As a family.” I looked around the table. “It’s about Pops.”
Nobody moved. Reggie, sitting across from me, looked at me stunned.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.
Especially since… everything that happened.
” I didn’t have to lay it out; every one of them knew about the blood and the knife on my kitchen floor and what it had done to us.
“I came out the other side of that really understanding him, for the first time.” I took a breath and swallowed.
“I don’t want him to die alone up there because I was too stubborn to go back a second time. ”
Simone started wiping tears from her eyes.
“So here’s what I want to discuss,” I said. “I think it’s time we bring our father home. I’m not telling you that. I’m asking you. All of you. Because he’s not just mine. He’s ours, and this decision is ours. I’m done being the only one who gets a vote at this table.”
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Zion nodded, looking down. “Yeah, Jules. Yeah.”
Uncle Reggie let out a breath I think he’d been holding since the day Pops left. Aunt Lorraine put her hand flat on the table. “It’s time, baby. Past time.”
“Yes. I agree,” Simone said, dabbing her face.
“Let’s do it.” Tre nodded.
“Okay. Then we’re all in agreement,” I said. “I’ll drive up there and—”
“No you won’t.” Tre cut me off, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, and when I looked at him, his grin was spreading.
“Absolutely not you, Jules.” He shook his head.
“You’d get up there talking about putting him on a meal plan, restructuring his days, interrogating his nurse, before you say hello.
He’d send you back down the hill out of self-preservation. ”
Zion chuckled into his cup, and Simone laughed through her tears. “Nah. This is a job for somebody with charm. Somebody personable. Somebody who—”
“Tre.”
“I’ll do it, Jules.”
And then his grin faded and he sat forward, seriously.
“Let me go get him. I mean it.” He held my eyes.
“You’ve got a pregnant wife. You’re not gonna want to be two days and a mountain away from Alyssa right now.
You’d go anyway, I know it, because that’s what you do.
You do the hard thing, every time, because you decided years ago that’s how it’s gonna be.
” He didn’t look away. “It’s not just yours to carry anymore, Jules. Let it be me.”
I looked at my baby brother. Fifteen when our mother died, the one I’d spent my entire adult life trying to keep the weight off of, sitting at the table asking me to hand him the heaviest thing we had left.
Every instinct in me wanted to say no. It had to be me, because if it didn’t go well, I was the one who could take it. Because taking it alone used to be the only way I knew to love anybody.
I looked at Alyssa. She wasn’t going to say a word, but her hand was on my leg under the table.
“Okay,” I nodded. “Go bring him home, Tre.”