Chapter 29
JESS
Let me back up, because the best night of that whole Christmas actually happened the evening before Carter got that phone call.
My parents had come up from Kansas City for the holiday, and by the time we all got to Liam and Anne’s on Christmas Eve, Carter had survived a solid run of the full Calloway experience — and passed.
I’d been nervous about it, which was ridiculous — I’m a grown woman with a mortgage and a child and a hospital department to run.
But there’s a specific dread to watching the man you love meet the father who taught you how to be loved, and my dad does not hand out approval like party favors.
Herb Calloway had spent my entire dating life being politely, immovably unimpressed by everyone.
He lasted about an evening with Carter. What got him wasn’t the Stanley Cup or the charm — it was watching Carter fold himself down onto my living room floor to help Justin with a Lego set, taking a first-grader’s engineering opinions with complete seriousness, in no hurry to be anywhere else.
Later, in the kitchen, my father dried a dish and said, without looking at me, “He’s good with the boy. You can’t fake that. I’ve watched men fake a lot of things over the years. Not that.
From Herb, that was practically a blessing read aloud in church.
My mother had needed even less time. Catherine Calloway had taken one look at the way Carter watched me across a room and pulled me into the pantry and gripped both my hands and said “oh, Jessica,” in a voice full of every single thing she was too wise to say out loud.
But all of that came together in a single, blurred, wonderful week, and I want to put it in order, because it still amazes me it all fit.
It started with Chicago. The very first days of Justin’s school break, before anybody else came anywhere, Justin and I made the drive up to see Rosa — an early Christmas, just the two of us and her, because I’d promised her we’d come and because six years of her showing up for us every single day had earned a whole lot more than a card in the mail.
She opened the door and burst into tears before either of us said a word.
“He’s so big,” she kept saying, holding Justin’s face in both hands and turning it toward the light like she was checking he was real. “Jess. Jess, look at him. When I left he still had the baby cheeks.
Where did they go? Who said he could do this? Justin, for his part, submitted to the inspection with the patience of a boy who has always understood exactly how much Rosa loves him and has never once questioned whether it was worth the fuss.
She wanted every detail. The new school, the new friends, the bear named Carter Junior — she made him tell that story twice and cried through it both times.
She wanted to know if he was sleeping. If he was eating vegetables. Whether the move had been hard on him.
Whether I was okay. She asked that one quietly, in the kitchen, with her hand on my arm and Justin in the other room.
For six years she had known all of it without being told, because she was there for every day of it.
Now she wasn’t. Now she would only know what we remembered to tell her.
I watched that settle on her, right there at her own kitchen table.
And then I watched her put it down and pour everything she couldn’t say into the one thing she has always done best. She cooked her heart out for two days straight and fed us until we couldn’t eat another bite.
After a couple of days, it was time to head back to St. Louis.
It had been a good visit — better than good.
We saw Rosa and her family, a few of my friends from the hospital, a couple of the neighbors who’d watched Justin grow up on our old block.
We bundled up and walked the chilly lakefront at North Avenue Beach, Justin’s mittened hand in mine, the Chicago skyline stacked up silver and enormous against a gray December sky.
I’d forgotten, a little, how much I loved this city — and it felt good to stand there in the cold and appreciate everything the place had given us before we pointed the car south.
Rosa held Justin like she wanted to memorize every part of him. She sent us off with a cooler of food so enormous that I was still bringing containers of it in to my staff at the hospital days later.
When we pulled away she stood out on the step in the cold with both hands pressed to her mouth. Justin twisted around in his booster seat and waved at her until we turned the corner and she was gone.
Then he was quiet for a while.
“Rosa should live closer,” he said.
“I know, bug. I miss her too.” And I blinked until the road came back into focus.
It’s four hours south. We made the drive on the twenty-third with a car full of Rosa’s cooking and Justin narrating every truck we passed.
We pulled in — home now, actually home — just as fresh snow started coming down.
Carter had a home game that night, so it was just Justin and me for the evening.
I got the cooler unloaded, got Justin fed and bathed and finally, eventually, down.
Then I ran a bath so hot it fogged the mirror and sat in it until the drive worked its way out of my shoulders, and I let myself feel, for the first time in days, that we were really here.
That St. Louis was ours now — our new city, our new life, even if the house we’d fill was still out there somewhere, waiting for me to find it.
It was the last quiet I’d get for a while.
The next morning my parents arrived from Kansas City and the house filled up, and the days blurred into wrapping paper and too much food and Justin’s ongoing campaign to stay up past every bedtime on record.
Which was how the five of us — Carter, Justin, my parents, and me — ended up walking into Liam and Anne’s bright, loud, crowded house together on Christmas Eve, while the snow came down.
Liam was a wonderful host all night — warm, easy, working the room the way he always did, greeting every teammate and neighbor at the door with a handshake and that big steady grin.
But he was also, unmistakably, nervous. And whenever he wasn’t shaking somebody’s hand, he drifted straight back to Anne like a puppy who couldn’t stand to be more than a few feet from her — a hand at the small of her back, a kiss on her temple, one more excuse to be near her.
Anybody in that room could see the man was gone for her.
He’d hugged her about six times more than a hockey player normally hugs anyone.
I didn’t know what had him wound so tight. I assumed the club was about to make a trade.
Then, around nine, Finn made his delivery, and I forgot all about Liam and whatever had him so wound up.
Not because of the dragon costume, or the announcement, or the glitter-drowned macaroni necklace. Everybody in that room saw those. Half of them filmed it.
What I saw was my son.
Justin fell in behind Finn without being asked and walked him the whole length of that living room like an honor guard.
I put my hand over my mouth. The tears came up hot and fast, and they were not for the necklace.
They were for the sight of my boy taking something seriously. Two months ago he’d folded a jersey onto a shelf and taught himself that people leave. And here he was, believing in a homemade present enough to march it across a room in total solemnity.
Some of that was just Justin — he’s always had more heart than any kid his size has a right to. But some of it was the shift in our house since Carter had come back to us. There was a new energy in those rooms now, a lightness, and it wasn’t only mine. Justin felt it too.
A kid can tell when the adults around him have stopped bracing for the floor to drop, and he’d stopped bracing right along with us.
Anne found me by the counter a while after that, two glasses of wine in hand, one of which she pressed into my fingers without asking whether I wanted it.
“Six years,” she said, watching the boys across the room. “Did you ever think we’d be here? Both of us? In St. Louis, with these lunatics?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I thought I’d be alone and fine forever. I’d made my peace with it. I was good at it.”
“I know you were.” Anne squeezed my hand.
“That’s what makes this the good ending.
You weren’t rescued. You were already whole.
You just got more.” She glanced across the room, to where Carter was crouched down letting Justin and Finn show him something on the floor, his big frame folded up small to get to their level, listening to whatever they were explaining with total apparent seriousness.
“He looks more relaxed. Happier. You both do.”
I didn’t answer. I just looked at him.
She followed my gaze. “He’s not going anywhere, Jess. You told me what he said at your door — that he was scared, out loud, to your face. Men like him don’t say that on their way out. They say it when they’ve decided to stay. He’s yours.”
“I know,” I said. And this time — for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever — I said it and I actually believed it, all the way down, no armor, no hedge.
Later, much later, when the party had thinned and the kids had crashed — Justin and Finn passed out sideways across the same bed in a heap, Carter Junior and a stuffed dragon between them — I found myself standing at the window with a mug of Barbara’s spiced cider, and Carter came and stood behind me and wrapped both arms around me and put his chin on my shoulder.
“Good night?” he said.
“The best night.” I leaned back into him. “Look at it. It’s actually snowing. On Christmas Eve. It’s obscene. It’s like the sky is showing off.”
I felt him smile against my neck.
We stood there for a while, not talking, his arms around me and the warm wreckage of a great party behind us — dishes, wrapping paper, the low murmur of the few adults left, Barbara and Mark saying their goodnights, Anne’s laugh from somewhere.
My son asleep down the hall in a pile with his best friend.
A man at my back who had walked through fire to be standing exactly here.