27. Stephanie #3
“You have a notebook,” I said slowly, and then it dropped into place all at once.
The drugstore cover worn soft as an old dollar.
The fat rubber band. The thing I’d picked up off the nightstand in the kids’ cabin the night of the flood, and turned over in my hands, and almost opened, and put back because it wasn’t mine to read.
“Oh my god. I held it that night in the cabin. I almost-” I stopped, my face going hot. “That’s what that was.”
“I have a notebook,” he confirmed.
“Of all your mistakes.”
“My therapist suggested it.”
“And you analyzed them?” I couldn’t keep the delight out of my voice.
“Thoroughly.”
“I held the answer in my own two hands and gave it back.” I raised my eyebrows and watched him squirm. “And now I’m VERY curious about what I put back that night.”
He glared at his sister, who looked supremely unrepentant. Then he turned back to me and softened.
“It’s yours whenever you want to read it,” he said. “Everything I have is yours.”
He got up and came back with a worn notebook, its cover gone soft at the corners from years of handling.
He set it in my hands so carefully his fingers were shaking, and I opened it to a page near the middle.
His handwriting filled every line, cramped and small, each entry dated in the corner the way he dated his charts.
One of them stopped me cold. March 14. She called eleven times tonight and I silenced every one because the dinner felt more important.
She lost our baby alone on the stairs while I laughed at a client’s joke, and I never even felt the phone go quiet in my pocket.
I have to become a man who answers. My throat closed, and I couldn’t pull a full breath around what I’d just read.
He reached out and yanked me against him, wrapping both arms around my waist.
“EWWW,” Hugo and Harry said in unison.
“Get a room,” Hugo added.
“This is my room. This is my house.”
“Technically it’s Steph’s house,” Harry pointed out. “You said so yourself.”
Kevin looked down at me, the question in his eyes bigger than the words.
“Our house?”
“Ours,” I agreed.
We all stood there a moment, the four of us, in the living room of a house that had seen so much joy and pain.
A loose thread had been nagging at me through the whole confession, and now, with the scale of this family’s capacity for scheming laid out in front of me, it finally surfaced.
“Wait,” I said slowly. “The pipe.”
Kevin looked at me. “What pipe?”
“At your mother’s birthday. The pipe that burst in my cabin and flooded the whole thing and meant I had to share the kids’ bunk cabin with you.
” I sat up straight, the pieces snapping together one after another.
“The pipe that happened to burst in the one cabin I was sleeping in, on the one weekend you and I were both there, at an event your mother spent four months making sure I’d attend. ”
A silence fell over the room. A very specific, very guilty silence.
Harry became extremely interested in her engagement ring.
“Oh my god.” I stood up. “It wasn’t a burst pipe. Tris flooded my cabin on purpose. Your mother committed felony plumbing to make me sleep in a bunk bed next to you.”
“I’m sure that’s not-” Kevin started, and then stopped, because he was picturing it too, and we both knew his mother, and it was extremely that. “Okay. It’s a little that.”
“A little?” Harry snorted, then clapped a hand over her mouth, having plainly meant to stay out of it.
Too late. Every head swung toward her. She dropped the hand and sighed the sigh of a woman who has already lost. “Fine. She may have mentioned a plan. She may have had Lando loosen a fitting. There may have been a group chat.”
“A GROUP CHAT?”
“It’s called Operation Second Chance,” Harry said, with the doomed dignity of someone reading their own charges aloud. “I’m an administrator. Hugo made the icon. It’s a little cartoon of a wrench.”
Hugo raised a hand like a proud student. “The wrench was my idea.”
I stared around the room at the two of them, at my own brother, at the man I was apparently, against all odds and one act of premeditated vandalism, back in love with.
I opened my mouth to be furious. I really did try.
And then I thought about how the whole ridiculous scheme had actually worked, how a foot of pipe water had put me in a room with the sparkling water and the cleared bottom bunk and the notebook I’d almost opened, and how I wouldn’t, if I was honest, undo a single soggy inch of it.
“I’m getting added to that group chat,” I said. “Effective immediately.”
“Already done,” Harry said. “We renamed it. It’s just called The Family now.”
“So,” I said finally, pulling back from Kevin but keeping his hand knotted in mine. “We’ve got a wedding to plan.”
Harry’s face lit up. “PLEASE HELP. I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never planned a wedding. I don’t know where to start.”
“When are you thinking?”
“Soon. As soon as possible. We’ve wasted enough time already.”
I looked at Kevin. He looked at me, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. Some people got to skip the wasted years. Some of us had to earn our way back through them.
“Let’s get started,” I said, and for one more hour, before any of it came for us, we were just two families in a living room, laughing, planning a wedding, happy.