Chapter 2
Lily
Nora hits me before the car door is fully open.
Thirty-Four pounds of four-year-old moving at full speed, arms already reaching. I drop to a crouch on the front path just in time to catch her. She burrows into my neck... I close my eyes and hold on.
"I missed you, baby."
"I missed you more," she says... a phrase she heard somewhere and has been repeating to everyone for three weeks.
Hannah comes up the path behind her, bags looped over both arms, already talking about the traffic on the bridge.
I listen with half my attention. The rest goes to the front door where Liam has appeared, completely bypassing the adults in favor of my father.
Dad opens his arms from the porch steps like a man who has been waiting for exactly this.
They meet in the middle of the lawn. Dad lifts him...
Liam is eight and getting heavy, but Dad is stubborn about these things, carrying him up the steps like he weighs nothing.
I look toward the car. Ava is still standing beside the bumper.
I read her eyes, and almost like mother's instinct, I feel the warmth and comfort she needs. She seems so old now... thirteen. Ava is not me, though. She has always been quieter, more serious, and the last year has asked more of her than it should have.
I cross the grass and stop in front of her. I get down on my knees on the front walk, right there in my good jeans, and open my arms.
She folds into me so fast it almost knocks me back.
I think of the last time I held her like this.
I was on the living room couch, still in my pajamas at ten p.m., a throw pillow pressed against my face. The sounds coming out of me were muffled.
She came downstairs without a sound. One moment I was alone, and the next her small hand was on my back, moving in slow circles.
"Is it Daddy again?" she asked.
I pulled the pillow down. Her face was serious, careful, entirely too old for twelve.
"No," I said. "No, it's not."
"Mom." Her voice was patient. "It's not the first time you've cried on your birthday."
I opened my mouth to explain, to redirect, to do any of the things you do when you are a mother and you have been caught. Instead I just looked at her. At the steadiness of her. At the cost of it.
"Happy birthday," she said quietly. "I'll be right back."
She came back in four minutes with a handmade card, folded and slightly uneven, her handwriting covering the inside in blue ink.
She pressed it into my hands and climbed onto the cushions and wrapped her arms around my shoulders.
I broke completely. I wanted to be strong — I kept trying to pull the breath back, to be the one doing the comforting — but every time I got close she tightened her grip and the wall came down again.
"I love you," I whispered into her hair. "Your dad loves you. I love you, your dad loves you."
I said it until her breathing slowed and her body went heavy against me and her eyes closed. I held her for a long time after that.
***
Later, when the children are inside with Hannah and the kitchen sounds drift out through the screen door, I find my parents on the porch.
They are in the rocking chairs... the old ones my father refinished three summers ago and refuses to replace despite the persistent creak in the left one.
My mother is in the middle of a story, and Dad is watching her face...
the way he has always watched her face, like she is still the most interesting thing in the room.
She catches him looking and swats his arm without losing her place.
I lean against the porch pillar, watching them. "What makes a marriage work?"
I do not mean to say it out loud. But the evening is warm, my guard is down, and the question has been sitting in my chest all day.
The rocking stops. My father... Pastor George to his congregation, just Daddy to me... straightens slightly in his chair. "Jesus first," he says, without a moment's hesitation.
My mother looks at him. "I concur with the man," she says.
They both laugh. The creak of the chairs fills the quiet between us again. Then my mother turns to me, her voice changing... still warm, but careful now. The tone she uses when she is about to say something I might not want to hear.
"In your case, baby... communication would have made it better."
I push off the pillar. "Mom—"
"No, no." My father raises one finger. Not at me... at her. "Let my queen finish."
My mother shakes her head, but she is smiling.
"Oh, Georgie. Thank you." She looks back at me.
"The space you took... it was good. Necessary.
I know you tried to reach him, Lily. But he was too used to there being no consequence.
He couldn't hear you yet." She pauses. "And you needed time to heal. You both did."
The porch goes quiet in that way it does when the important things are being said. My father leans forward, elbows on his knees. "My boy Noah," he says, almost to himself, shaking his head slowly. "He doesn't know what you both are cooking."
That makes my mother laugh... a real one that reaches her eyes. She gives him a look, and he gives her one back... something passing between them that has been passing between them for forty years.
"You're teaching her what you did to me, aren't you?" he says.
She wiggles her eyebrows. "Boys have to grovel," she says simply. "They have to know what they have. And the only sure way they know what they have..." she pauses, "...is by losing it."
I think back to a hospital room. The smell of antiseptic and industrial soap.
A nurse leaning into the doorway, asking where the father was in a tone that carried no judgment...
and somehow, that made it worse. My father stepping forward from the chair in the corner to take my hand.
The particular shape of that moment settling somewhere permanent inside me, even as everything else was noise and monitors and pain.
"What if I don't want him back?" I ask.
My voice comes out steadier than I expect. Something warm hits my cheekbone... I reach up and find the tear with my fingers.
My mother is already out of her chair. My father looks at me directly... that look of his with no softness in it and no parenting trick either, just the clean edge of someone who means every word.
"Then leave him," he says. "If he doesn't understand where he went wrong...
if he doesn't take real steps to fix what he broke...
don't go back. Not for the children. Not for the years.
Not for any of it." He sits forward. "He has to find the puzzle himself, Lily.
And until he does, you let him stay in the mud. "
My mother puts her arms around me from behind. I don't cry. I just stand there, held between the two of them, thinking... not for the first time... that I would not have survived any of this without them.
Sam is waiting outside my office when I get in the next morning, tablet in hand, already moving.
"Your new co-host is here," she says, falling into step beside me. "He's in Colton's office."
"Good." I drop my bag on my chair, check my reflection in the dark screen of my monitor out of habit, and head back down the hall.
The door to Colton's office is half open. I can see Colton at his desk and the back of someone in the chair across from him... broad shoulders, a particular way of sitting that takes up space without trying.
Something in my stomach shifts.
I know that back.
I push the door open the rest of the way.
He turns before I can arrange my face into anything useful, and there it is... that smile, the one that has always moved too fast and asked too many questions.
"Hello, news princess."
John Adler. Four years before Noah. The one my mother called that beautiful disaster and my father called a lesson. Standing in my place of work in a charcoal suit, looking like the last decade and a half happened to someone else entirely.
I feel the floor shift slightly under my feet.
I cross the room. I shake his hand. I smile back.
"John," I say. "It's been a while."