Griffin
Sarah had her mother’s eyes.
I’d noticed it the first time I’d held her in that hospital room, this small furious person who had arrived two weeks early on her own schedule. She’d looked up at me and I felt that same surge of love I’d felt when the nurse had handed her to me warm from her mother’s body.
Two months later, I still wasn’t used to it. Any of it. The weight of her in my arms. The terror of something mattering this much.
It was past five. The cabin was quiet. Keely was asleep, finally, after two weeks of Sarah deciding the middle of the night was the right time to be awake and vocal about it.
I’d gotten up without waking her, lifted Sarah from the bassinet, wrapped her in a blanket, and walked her out onto the porch.
The mountain air was sharp and clean. Sarah made a small sound against my chest, her fist curling around the collar of my shirt. That grip still surprised me every time. This small person was completely certain that whatever she’d grabbed onto wasn’t going anywhere.
She’d gotten that from her mother.
I sat down in the large chair I’d built after I’d finished all the repairs at Keely’s mother’s house.
The memory of those that day— showing up with lumber, working while Keely stood in the doorway trying to figure out what I was doing there — felt like a different lifetime.
It wasn’t. It was just the beginning of this one.
Sarah’s eyes were open with an expression of such serious concentration that I almost smiled. Keely made that same face over her nursing textbooks. Over her coffee. Over me, sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t looking.
The sky was starting to shift at the edges, the dark thinning, the first suggestion of light finding the peaks above us when the screen door opened behind me.
Keely stepped out, her hair loose, a blanket around her shoulders. She looked at me and then at Sarah and her face did the thing it always did — that particular softening that she kept only for the two of us and that I planned to spend the rest of my life earning.
“She wake you?” she murmured.
“No.”
Keely took Sarah from me before settling next to me, her weight easy and familiar against me.
She tucked her feet up and leaned back into my chest. I wrapped both arms around the two of them, holding them close.
The three of us sat there in the early quiet while the sky continued its slow shift toward morning.
“You should be sleeping,” I said into her hair.
“So should you.”
“I’m fine.”
She tilted her head back and looked up at me in the grey light. Really looked, the way she always did, like she was checking the temperature of something. Whatever she found seemed to satisfy her because she settled back without another word.
She didn’t know what I hadn’t told her yet.
That I slept now. That the last time I’d heard a truck backfire and felt the ground drop out from under me had been in a diner parking lot with her voice cutting through the fog—her hands on my forearms, her eyes on my face, steady and unafraid.
That after that night the noise had followed me home the way it always did, but something had been different.
That the night she moved in it had gone quiet and hadn’t come back.
That the dark felt different now—not empty, just dark.
That I’d lain awake plenty of nights since then but not once because of the ghosts.
Only because of this.
Sarah made a small sound and Keely shifted her gently, murmuring something too quiet for me to catch. I tightened my arms around both of them, and the dark, restless tension that had lived low in my gut finally bled out, settling into something permanent.
I’d been too old. Too damaged. Too far gone. I’d told myself that every time I’d walked into that diner and watched her move between the tables and made myself stay in the corner booth and keep my hands to myself.
I’d been wrong.
The sun broke over the peaks, the first real light spilling down and across the porch, and the three of us sat in it together while the mountain woke up around us.
I’d spent years simply surviving.
This was something else entirely.