Chapter 6 #2
"Honestly? Not like that. Nothing like that.
" He said it without self-pity, just fact.
"There wasn't a porch swing or a whole family or a tradition.
I grew up in Ames, Iowa — cold winters, flat land in every direction — and I moved around a lot.
Different houses, different people. The short version is it wasn't a happy childhood.
I never really belonged anywhere. I spent a long time feeling like I was just passing through whatever life I happened to be in.
" He paused. "So I don't have a fireworks story.
Not a good one." Another pause, and when he spoke again something in his voice had eased. "And then I met Mark Ewing."
"Your coach," I said.
"My club hockey coach. He and his wife Barbara — you'd love them, Jess. They're the most loving, genuine people I've ever known. They basically saved me — this confused, disheartened kid who had no idea what he was doing or where he was going.
Mark saw something in me I couldn't see in myself yet and just... kept showing up. Barbara made me dinner and asked about my day like it mattered." He shook his head. "It sounds simple when I say it out loud. It wasn't simple at the time."
I didn't say anything. I just held his hand a little tighter.
"They're still in Ames," he said. "I call them every week. They follow every game." A pause, quieter. "They're the reason I know what it looks like when someone actually chooses to show up for a kid."
I thought about Justin — about how carefully I'd built his life to make sure he always had people showing up for him. About the way Carter held him through fireworks without being asked.
"I was very lucky growing up," I said, when the quiet had stretched comfortable between us.
"I grew up in Kansas City. Two parents who are still married, which felt ordinary until I grew up and realized it wasn't. A brother and a sister.
Sunday dinners. My mom went back to work when we were all in school and never apologized for it, which I think is why I never apologized for anything I wanted either. "
"Including Justin."
"Especially Justin." I looked out at the lake. "He was the most deliberate decision I ever made. People thought I was crazy. My mother understood immediately."
"Of course she did."
We walked a while longer in comfortable silence, the city glittering behind us, and I thought about how different this was from every relationship I'd tried to have before — the ones where I'd always felt like I was performing something, editing myself, making sure I wasn't too much.
Carter never made me feel like too much. He made me feel like exactly enough.
We went back to my brownstone after the walk, the house quiet and dark with Justin already asleep, and ended up on the porch swing with the last of a bottle of wine and the city settling down around us.
He asked about my unit, about a new protocol I'd been pushing for months that had finally gotten approved, about what it felt like to win a small bureaucratic battle after a long fight.
He asked because he wanted to know — the genuine, unhurried interest that still surprised me, the way he made me feel like the things I cared about were worth caring about.
We stayed on that porch swing until well past midnight, tangled up in each other the way we'd gotten good at, the summer night warm around us, and I thought: this is what easy feels like.
Not uncomplicated. Not without distance or unanswered questions or a kid who had opinions about cake. Just — easy, in the way that mattered. The way that meant something.
"Come back to the hotel," he said, quietly, somewhere around one in the morning. Not a push — just an invitation, offered the same way he offered everything, with his whole attention and no pressure underneath it. "Have a drink with me. Stay if you want."
I looked at him for a moment in the low light of the porch. The street was quiet. Justin was asleep upstairs with Rosa down the hall. I had nowhere to be until Sunday morning.
I'd known I was going to say yes since the fireworks, if I was being honest with myself.
Maybe since the moment earlier, when Justin had counted Carter among his favorite people and Carter had caught my eye over my son's head — that look that didn't need any words, the one that told me this was already so much more than I'd bargained for, and that I'd stopped wanting to fight it.
"Okay," I said. "Let me grab a few necessities first."
He smiled and waited on the porch while I slipped inside — packed a quick bag, peeked in on Justin already deeply asleep, caught Rosa's eye in the hallway and said nothing because nothing needed to be said — and came back out two minutes later feeling like someone who had made a decision and was entirely at peace with it.