27. Jenna
JENNA
The living room looks like a paper mill exploded in it, and I mean that as a compliment.
Wrapping paper covers every visible surface in a snowdrift of red and gold and one suspicious patch of glitter that's going to be showing up in this carpet until the twins graduate high school, and somewhere under all of it Eli's already got his new metal detector running, sweeping it low across the floorboards with total concentration like the living room might be hiding buried treasure instead of three years of dropped Cheerios.
"I'm getting a signal," he announces, crouching to dig through a pile of ribbon. "Right here. Something metal."
"That's probably the coffee table leg, bud."
"It could also be treasure." He doesn't look up, entirely undeterred by logic. "You don't know what's under this house."
Josie's cross-legged by the tree with her new art supplies spread out in a fan around her, colored pencils and a case of paint and a sketchbook thick enough to double as a doorstop, and she's already got smears of red on both hands from a project she started approximately four minutes after unwrapping the box.
"This is the best thing that has ever happened," she says, with the flat, absolute certainty of an eight-year-old who has clearly forgotten every previous Christmas.
"Better than the bike?"
"The bike was good. This is better." She holds up a half-finished drawing of what I think is Biscuit, though the proportions suggest either a very small horse or a very confused hippo. "I'm going to draw everybody. You're next."
Biscuit himself is stationed by the fireplace wearing a stocking around his neck like a collar, Josie's doing from an hour ago, and he's tolerating it with the weary patience of a dog who has decided, somewhere over the last few years, that whatever the Walsh children do to him is simply part of the arrangement now.
He doesn't fight it. He just lies there blinking at the chaos with the stocking hanging off one ear, occasionally sighing in a way that sounds almost human.
Rafe's on the floor with his back against the couch, coffee going cold beside him, watching Eli's treasure hunt with the same focused attention he'd give an actual security sweep, and the way he fits so naturally into this specific mess catches me square in the chest the way it keeps doing lately, less like a surprise now and more like a fact I'm still getting used to knowing.
"Any luck?" he asks Eli.
"Not yet. But I found a bottle cap under the couch and a quarter, so technically it's already working."
"That's a solid return on investment for day one."
"What's a return on investment?"
"When you get more out of something than you put into it." Rafe reaches over and steals a piece of wrapping paper off Eli's head, where it's been sitting for the better part of twenty minutes. "You're getting there without even trying."
He didn't have to come this early. He didn't have to stay through the whole unwrapping, the cinnamon-roll breakfast that took twice as long as it should have because Josie insisted on decorating each one individually, the slow unraveling of a morning that has no actual schedule to it beyond whatever the twins want to do next.
He just showed up at seven with a bag of gifts and a thermos of coffee he'd already made, and he's been here since, folded into the day like he's always belonged in it, and nobody's had to ask him to stay because leaving was never on the table to begin with.
By early afternoon Eli's moved on from treasure hunting to demanding, with the total confidence of a small general issuing orders, that somebody build him a blanket fort worthy of the occasion.
"Not a regular fort," he clarifies, standing in the middle of the living room with his hands on his hips. "A good one. With rooms."
"Rooms," Rafe repeats, already standing, already scanning the couch cushions like he's assessing terrain. "How many rooms are we talking?"
"At least two. One for sleeping and one for snacks."
"That's a reasonable request." He starts pulling cushions off the couch with the exact same focus he brings to everything else, stacking them into a rough perimeter while Eli directs from the sidelines with escalating enthusiasm, and Josie abandons her drawing long enough to contribute an opinion on load-bearing structure that she clearly picked up from watching him work on something else entirely.
"You need a support beam," she says, pointing at the coffee table. "Otherwise it'll fall on somebody's head."
"Good call." Rafe drags the coffee table into position without being asked twice, and for the next twenty minutes he's fully committed to the project, not a shred of showmanship in it, testing blanket tension, adjusting a corner that keeps sagging, crawling half inside the structure at one point to check the sightlines from what Eli's designated the snack room.
He treats an eight-year-old's blanket fort with the exact seriousness he'd give an actual engineering problem, and Eli watches him work with the rapt, wide-eyed focus of a kid who's figured out, somewhere along the way, that Rafe doesn't do anything halfway, not even this.
I sit on the arm of the couch watching the two of them argue gently about whether a lamp counts as structural support, Josie narrating from the floor with her paints, Biscuit's stocking still hanging off one ear, and something settles in me that isn't just happiness.
I could build a whole life around exactly this, I think, watching him back out of the fort to inspect his own work.
It isn't the fireworks or the big declarations that get me.
It's just a man on his knees on my living room floor taking a blanket fort more seriously than it deserves because it matters to somebody he loves.
"It's structurally sound," he finally announces, straightening up. "You could survive a minor earthquake in there."
"Can we sleep in it tonight?"
"Ask your mother. I'm just the contractor."
"Mom?"
"We'll see how tired everybody is after dinner," I tell him, which both kids correctly interpret as a yes with extra steps, and Eli disappears into the fort immediately to claim the sleeping room before Josie can stake her own territory.
Dinner's loud and easy, turkey and too many side dishes and a pie my mother sent home with strict instructions about reheating that I ignore entirely, and afterward the twins negotiate a full hour of movie time before bed, which stretches into ninety minutes because nobody has the heart to enforce the original number on a night like this one.
By the time we finally get them settled, half asleep and stubbornly insisting they're not, the fort's been abandoned in favor of actual beds after all, and the house goes quiet in that particular way it only does at the end of a very long, very good day.
Rafe and I end up on the couch in front of the fire, the wreckage of wrapping paper mostly cleared into bags by the door, Biscuit finally free of his stocking and curled at our feet with a contented sigh that seems to speak for the whole house.
I've got my legs pulled up under me, his arm around my shoulders, and for a while neither of us says much of anything, just watches the fire do what fire does, and it's the kind of silence that doesn't need filling.
"Best Christmas I've had in years," he says eventually, quiet.
"Mine too. And I don't hand out that title lightly."
"I keep thinking about this morning. Eli with that detector, dead serious about buried treasure under your living room." He shakes his head, something soft moving across his face. "I don't think I've ever watched a kid commit to a bit that hard."
"Must run in the family somewhere. Wherever that gene came from."
"I'll take partial credit." He goes quiet again, and this time it feels different, heavier somehow, like he's circling something rather than just resting in the moment. "Jenna."
"Yeah?"
He shifts to look at me properly, firelight catching the side of his face, and there's something in his eyes I recognize now, the same look that showed up right before he said Danny's name on that ranch overlook, the one that caught in his throat by this exact fire not that long ago.
Whatever he's about to say has been sitting in him a while, gathering weight, and I go still, giving him the room to get there in his own time.
"I've been thinking a lot lately about what I actually want," he says slowly. "I don't think I've ever said it out loud to anyone. Not even to myself, not really. But I want to say it to you tonight. I don't want to keep sitting on it."
"Okay." My heart's doing something complicated in my chest, half anticipation, half a kind of careful hope I'm almost afraid to let all the way in. "I'm listening."
"You should know I'm not just here for the easy parts.
The holidays, the good days, days like today.
" He takes my hand and threads his fingers through mine, holding on tighter than the moment strictly calls for.
"I want the whole thing. I want to be the guy who's here for all of it, every version of this family, not just the parts that are simple to love. "
A sound cracks through the quiet from down the hall, high and thin and unmistakable, Josie's voice pitching up fast into something close to a wail, and Rafe's on his feet before I've fully processed what I heard, moving through the living room with the same instant, unthinking speed I've watched him move with before, no hesitation in it at all.
"Stay," he says, not unkindly, already halfway to the hall. "I've got her."
I follow anyway, a few steps behind, and by the time I reach Josie's doorway he's already sitting on the edge of her bed, gathering her against his chest while she cries into his shirt in short, hiccupping bursts, still half tangled in the nightmare she hasn't fully surfaced from yet.
"Hey. Hey, I'm right here." His voice has dropped into something low and steady, the same register he must have used a hundred times on men twice her size in situations far worse than this one, and it works on her exactly the way it works on everyone, a calm underneath the words that just says you're safe now, no explanation needed.
"You're okay. Whatever it was, it's not real anymore. I promise you that."
"There was a storm," she manages, muffled against him. "And you and Mom couldn't find us. Me and Eli were lost and you couldn't find us anywhere."
"I would find you." He doesn't hesitate over it, just keeps rubbing slow circles against her back like the answer's the easiest thing he's said all day. "I'd find you in any storm there is. That's not something you ever have to worry about, not with me around."
"Promise?"
"Promise." He presses a kiss to the top of her head, still rocking her gently, patient like none of this needs rehearsing, like comforting a frightened kid at midnight is just one more thing he knows exactly how to do without having to think about it first. "I'm not going anywhere.
Not in a storm, not any other day either. "
I stand in the doorway watching him hold my daughter through the last of her tears, his whole attention narrowed down to keeping her steady, and something in me comes undone quietly, the same way it did the first time I watched him get down on his knees for these kids and mean it.
Whatever he was about to say by the fire, it'll keep. This, right here, already answers something I didn't know I was still asking.
Josie's breathing evens out slowly against his shoulder, and I lean against the doorframe and let myself watch it happen, in no hurry at all to interrupt him finishing what he started.