Chapter 5
LILY
The King-Edwards compound is absurd. Rome designed the whole thing. The main house is Poppy and Ramsey's. Sprawling, light-filled, more rooms than two people could ever use. The kitchen island alone is the size of a small apartment.
The second house belongs to Gran and Beth, smaller but equally beautiful, tucked closer to the tree line like it wanted privacy but not too much.
The third is Vera's. Set slightly apart, smaller than the others because that's what she asked for.
The running joke is that Ramsey doesn't care about material things. Still drives the same old truck, still wears flannels that have seen better decades, but somewhere along the way, he decided the people he loved deserved the best of what he could give. That turned out to be quite a lot.
Mid-March is still too cold for the porch, so we're gathered around the kitchen island instead. Poppy has something in the oven that smells like cinnamon and butter and too many calories I'm absolutely going to eat anyway.
Ramsey is out somewhere with Callahan. Rome and Erin are at home doing whatever disgustingly domestic thing they do on weekends now.
This house always smells like something baking. This is what I didn't know I was longing for until I found it. The feel and smell of home and family, wrapped up in a kitchen that's too big and just right at the same time.
"Estrogen Council incoming," Poppy announces, clinking her glass against mine as the kitchen door swings open.
Gran leads the charge. Tiny and silver-haired, moving like someone who's been running things so long she's forgotten other people think they're in charge.
Behind her is Beth, Poppy's mom, wearing a cardigan that's probably older than I am. And Vera, Ramsey's mom, tall and elegant, already scanning the counter for the cinnamon rolls not finished yet.
I met all three of them last summer, the night Erin brought me to dinner, back when I was still just Rome's little sister visiting from across the country. They took one look at me, decided I was theirs, and that was that.
Gran fed me until I physically could not move. Beth and Vera asked about school with genuine interest. By the end of the night, I'd felt more mothered than I had in years, maybe ever. I went home and cried myself to sleep like a child.
Since moving to Harbor Hill, I've been back for dinner more times than I can count. Each time, the ache gets a little smaller. Or maybe a little bigger. I can't tell anymore.
Gran reaches the island and grabs my face with both hands. Right on schedule.
"Still gorgeous." She turns my head left, then right, like she's inspecting produce at a farmer's market. "Unacceptable."
"Hi, Gran," I grin as I let her do what she pleases.
"Are you eating? You look thin."
"You say that every time."
"Because it's true every time." She kisses my forehead, releases me, and turns to accept wine from Poppy like it's her God-given right. Which, in this house, it probably is.
Harbor Hill has a specific way of complimenting you. Beautiful and inconvenient. Stunning and suspicious. Like your face is something you'd done to them personally. An act of aggression they're choosing to forgive. I love it.
Vera squeezes my arm as she passes.
"How's the apartment now that you've settled, sweetheart?" she asks, sliding onto the stool beside me.
"Perfect. Rome did a good job." I pause. "But he cannot get rid of spiders."
I'd found two this week. Called Rome about both. Texted him roughly nineteen times about the first one alone. Detailed texts. Photographs. A voice memo that was mostly just me saying Rome in increasingly desperate tones. He'd sent Erin, which was practical and deeply disloyal.
"Didn't you grow up on dig sites?" Poppy asks, pulling cinnamon rolls from the oven. God, I love her. "In the dirt? In foreign countries? With actual wildlife?"
"Yes."
"So you were probably surrounded by spiders your entire childhood."
"I was. That is exactly why I hate them." I take a sip of wine, not caring how early it is. "Years of exposure did not desensitize me. It radicalized me."
Beth settles onto her stool, wine already in hand. "Rome always does a good job. That boy could build a house in his sleep." She turns to me. "It's the being human part he struggles with."
"Mom." Poppy looks mortified that her mother would criticize my brother right in front of me.
"I say it with love."
Fair enough. I say worse about Rome daily, but I'm also his biggest defender. The first to list every impossible thing he's done for me if anyone pushes too hard. He's earned every eye roll I've ever given him. He's also earned every bit of loyalty I have.
"Where's the chair?" Vera asks.
"Will's bringing it," Poppy answers, setting plates next to the tray. She tears off a piece of cinnamon roll with her fingers. "He called this morning. Said it's finished and he's driving it over this afternoon."
"Will Holt?" I know the name. He’s Callahan's dad, but I haven't met him yet.
"Cal's dad." Poppy pushes a plate toward me. "He makes furniture. Handmade, beautiful stuff. He built Ramsey and me a rocking chair for the porch as a housewarming gift."
"Will Holt is one of the good ones," Gran says, swirling her wine like it contains prophecy. "Lost his wife young. Never remarried. Never even looked at another woman, as far as anyone knows. Just works in that shop of his and raises that boy."
"That boy is twenty-nine, Mother." Beth shakes her head. "He hardly needs raising anymore."
"He's a boy until I say otherwise."
"His wife was lovely," Vera adds, quieter than the others. Gentler. "She made you feel like she had all the time in the world for you even when she didn't. That was Anna."
"Cal was eighteen when she died," Poppy says, and something in her tone tells me she wants me to have this piece before I meet him. Before I see his father's face and put things together on my own. "Aneurysm. No warning. Just gone."
I stare at my hands. Eighteen was too young to lose a mother.
I grew up without a mother in any way that counted.
No school pickups. No one braiding my hair.
No one to call when I got my first period.
Rome handled that. A teenager with a YouTube tutorial and a box of pads from the pharmacy and panic in his eyes that he tried so hard to hide.
I've missed my mother in waves my whole life. Sometimes small, when seeing a friend's mom pack their lunch. Watching someone get picked up after school by a woman who looked happy to see them.
Sometimes the waves were so big I couldn't take it. Like the night before my high school graduation, when I sat in my room alone and wished, just once, my parents would call and say they were proud of me without me having to ask first.
The only times they showed interest was when I mentioned Johns Hopkins or Stanford, the only two places good enough in their eyes.
But still, my mother is alive. I could call if I wanted. She might not always answer, but the possibility exists. The door is still there, even if no one ever walks through it.
Callahan was eighteen. His mother was there, and then she wasn't, and the door closed forever. He had to keep living in a house full of her things and nothing of her. Keep waking up in a world where the flowers stopped appearing in the kitchen. I press my fingers into my wine glass and look away.
"You." Gran's voice cuts through, and I've never been more grateful for an interruption in my life. She points her wine glass at me like a weapon. "How old are you now?"
"Twenty-two."
"Good. You're young. Do things. Make mistakes. Fall in love with someone inappropriate." She levels me with a serious look. "Don't waste your twenties being sensible."
Beth sighs like she's heard this speech a thousand times. "Don't listen to her, honey. Be sensible."
"Sensible is for your thirties. Your twenties are for living."
"Your twenties are for building a foundation," Beth counters, straightening her cardigan like the gesture will lend her argument weight.
"You spent your twenties getting knocked up by a literal stranger and being a single mother alongside your best friend, Beth. Stop preaching."
I laugh hard, right along with everyone else because Gran told not a single lie.
"Your twenties are for both," Vera says, quiet and final. We all look at her like she'd just ended a war.
I love them. All three of them. They bicker like they've been doing it for decades, which they have. Loud and opinionated and so deeply woven into each other's lives they couldn't tell where one ended and another began.
It hurts if I think about it too long. My own mother hasn't called in months. My father sent a photo of a rock formation with his thumb up in front of it. These women, who share no blood with me, have asked about my apartment, my eating habits, and my emotional wellbeing in the last four minutes.
"So." Beth turns to me with a look that's shifted from warm to strategic. "Any young men on the radar?"
"Mom, stop pressuring her." Poppy groans. "She just got here."
"I'm asking." Beth is completely unapologetic. "Gran's right. She's young and beautiful and new in town. It's a reasonable question."
"There are no young men."
Beth and Vera snort into their glasses, then catch each other's eye and giggle. For a split second, I see all the years they've done just that. From childhood to now, a friendship that's outlasted everything.
"What about Cal?" Gran says it like she's been sitting on it for twenty minutes, waiting for exactly the right gap. She swirls her wine, doesn't look at me while she says it. Which is how you know it's deliberate.
Poppy puts her face in her hands.
"Cal is a lovely young man," Vera muses. "He's so handsome. Comes from a great family. Has a good job and is respected. If anyone in this town is good enough for you, sweetheart, it's probably him."
I keep my face very still, but my pulse has other ideas, so I take a sip of wine like everything is casual and normal and completely fine.
"But?"