56. Chapter Fifty-Six #2
They graduate in the spring. Benson, Rowan, Stanley — off into drafts and jobs and whatever comes next, scattered to wherever their lives are about to take them. This is the last December all of us get like this. This house, this configuration of people who saved my life –– gone.
Stanley catches me looking. And for one second, the whole performance drops off his face, and what’s underneath is a man thinking the exact thing I’m thinking.
“This is good,” he says, quiet, just to me. “You know that, right? This is the best. I’m telling you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
“Don’t make it weird, Deveroux. I was thinking––”
And Gianna dumps a fistful of snow straight down the back of his neck, and he shrieks like a kettle, and the whole tub goes up laughing, and the moment folds itself back down into the noise where it’s safe.
But I’ve got it now. I used to believe the only way to keep a good thing was not to look at it too hard — that the second you noticed you were happy, you’d already lost it.
That was how it always worked for me. I only ever recognized a good stretch of my life in the rearview, once it was gone and too late to feel.
But that isn’t what’s happening here. I’m sitting in the steam watching my whole family laugh in the snow, and I know it ends, and knowing it ends doesn’t wreck it. It does the opposite.
I get to miss this. And missing it already means I have it. Means I’m here for it, awake inside it, for once in my life not watching my own happiness through glass from somewhere out in the cold.
Penelope finds me out on the balcony late, after everyone’s finally gone to bed.
The snow’s stopped. The whole valley’s laid out below us, white and silent and lit that deep electric blue that only exists at night in the mountains, and I’m just standing out in the cold breathing it when the door slides open behind me and she steps out in some soft bundled-up thing with two mugs steaming in her hands.
Something in my chest gives way at the sight of her, the way it does every time now — this quiet caving-in that used to frighten me and doesn’t anymore.
She passes me a mug. I kiss her cold cheek to thank her, because I still can’t always find the words for it.
We stand there a while without talking, her looking out at the valley, me looking at her. We’ve always been good at this. The quiet was one of the first things we ever had.
“I keep thinking about next year,” I say.
She turns her head.
“When they’re gone. The guys. Rowan’s talking about a master’s, so maybe he sticks around, but Benson and Stanley are gone for sure.” I turn the mug slowly in my hands. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about what it looks like. After.”
I hear myself say it and understand that I have never thought about after in my entire life.
Not once. There was never an after worth building a thought around — there was only the next thing to get through, the next house, the next placement, one foot and then the other with my eyes on the ground.
After was a country I didn’t have papers for.
And here I am on a balcony in the mountains telling this woman, out loud, in plain English, that I’ve been picturing a version of a year I haven’t reached yet.
That I’ve been imagining a future. That somewhere deep and new I’ve started to believe I’m going to get one.
She hears it. All of it. The size of the thing underneath the small words. Her whole face changes.
“What does it look like?” she asks.
“For me?”
She nods.
“You’re graduating.” I look at her. “You’ll be out there doing all of it.
Your whole life will start.” I make myself hold her eyes for the next part, because it’s the truest thing I’ve got and it deserves to be said to her face.
“But for me… you’re in it. Whatever it turns out to look like — you’re in every version of it. There isn’t one where you’re not.”
She blinks fast. Her eyes have gone bright in the blue dark.
And she doesn’t say anything back. She just steps in and puts her head on my shoulder, and we stand there looking out at the white valley and don’t say another word about it, because it’s already been said.
The biggest thing I’ve ever managed to get out of my mouth, and I finally got it out.
And she knows because she kisses me slowly.
The next day, we all try skiing instead, purely for the comedy of it, and it turns out the five of us are elite-level bad — our one true talent is the wipeout, taking each other out like bowling pins while Aspen and Penelope carve past us shaking their heads and the rest of the girls give up on us entirely and go get warm at the lodge.
By the time we pile into the cars for the drive home, the whole trip has quietly decided something without holding a vote: nobody’s going home for Christmas.
Christmas is coming to Hawthorne. The girls already have a dinner menu going.
The guys and I stop on the way back and wrestle a last-minute real Christmas tree onto the roof of Benson’s truck, and we decorate the tree that night like a pack of overgrown five-year-olds — no theme, no restraint, tinsel absolutely everywhere.
The girls run lights along every wall until the whole house glows.
And then it snows us in, properly in, roads gone, nobody leaving — and we’ve got a fridge full of food and a house full of people and nowhere on this earth we have to be.
It’s the best stretch of days I’ve ever lived. The best family time of my whole life. I keep having to stop and privately confirm to myself that it’s real.
Christmas Eve, Penelope comes back from a quick run to her apartment for a few things — and she comes in through the front door.
I don’t know if anyone else even registers it.
But I do. For years, this girl came into this house one way and one way only — through the side door, in the dark, silent, after everyone was asleep, a secret I smuggled in and smuggled out again before the sun came up.
And now she walks in the front in broad daylight with her arms full of her own things, and the second she’s over the threshold, Gianna’s shouting her name across the house and Melly’s grabbing her by the sleeve and towing her toward the kitchen, and the noise just closes over her and takes her in.
I stand in the hallway and watch the whole warm loud house fold itself around her, and not one single person thinks a thing of it.
Not one. Because she belongs here. Because she always did — I just kept her in the dark for years, too scared to find out the thing I was so afraid of was never real to begin with.
She belongs here. Same as I do. Both of us, all the way in.
Christmas morning, I wake before her and kiss her softly on the cheek. She stretches the whole length of herself against me, blinking her eyes open.
“Merry Christmas, Penelope.”
“Merry Christmas, Percy,” she whispers, still half asleep.