Chapter 13
Meeting the Family
Beck came home with her for the first time over a long weekend in late January, four hours in the car spent mostly on Tessa narrating an increasingly detailed briefing, complete with what she insisted were essential logistics and he insisted were completely unnecessary levels of preparation for meeting people who were, in his words, "just humans, Tessa, I've met humans before. "
"My dad will ask you about your intentions within the first ten minutes.
Just answer honestly, he respects that more than a rehearsed answer, he can smell a rehearsed answer from a mile away, don't even try it.
My mom will feed you until you physically can't move, and if you try to say you're full, she will take it as a personal insult to her cooking and possibly her entire heritage, so just keep eating slower instead of stopping outright.
It's just the three of them now, since it's just us at home, so don't expect a big crowd. It's a lot quieter than it used to be."
"I know. You've told me. I'm not expecting a crowd, I promise."
She was quiet the rest of the drive, watching the exits count down, her knee bouncing without her permission.
It wasn't that she doubted him. It was that this house held everything left of her family that hadn't fractured, and some old, careful part of her still flinched at the idea of handing anyone new access to it, still braced for the version of this where he saw the smaller, quieter shape of what was left and quietly recalculated what she was worth.
He reached over without being asked and laced his fingers through hers on the console, not saying anything, just letting the weight of his hand answer the fear before she'd said a single word of it out loud.
He handled it beautifully. Her father did ask about his intentions, standing at the grill despite the January cold, and Beck answered without hesitating.
"I intend to keep showing up," he said, meeting her father's eyes. "That's the only intention I've got, sir."
Her father, who had watched Tyler come and go with a suspicion that turned out entirely justified, nodded once and handed him a spatula like he'd passed an unofficial test. "Watch the burgers. Don't flip them yet. Patience is the whole trick."
"I've been told I'm good at patience," Beck said, and her father laughed a real laugh.
Her mother fed him until he physically couldn't move, and cried a little over dinner when Beck asked, gently, about Poppi, letting Angela talk for twenty straight minutes without once redirecting.
"He would have loved you," her mother said, wiping her eyes. "He would have made you eat four helpings and then asked you to fix something in the garage, just to see what you were actually made of."
"I'm pretty good with a wrench," Beck said, straight-faced. "Tell him I've got references."
"You're staring," Tessa murmured, nudging him under the table.
"I can't help it. I've genuinely never seen anything like this — the way you all just orbit each other. I didn't grow up around this."
Her father caught the tail end of that, and later, once the dishes were cleared, he found Beck alone on the back deck.
"Can I say something to you," her father said, "man to man, before you two head back up there tomorrow?"
"Of course, sir."
"Tessa has spent her whole life living for other people.
Her family, her friends — she shows up, she gives, she carries.
Some of that's our fault, the whole family's fault.
We let her become that person because it made things easier for the rest of us.
" He was quiet for a moment. "What I want for her is someone who lives for her the same way she's spent her life living for everyone else.
Someone who gives her adventure instead of asking her to manage everyone else's.
She's given so much of herself away for free.
I want her to have someone who hands some of it back. "
"I want that too, sir," Beck said. "I don't think I fully understood that was the assignment until you just said it out loud. But I want that too."
"Good." Her father clapped him once on the shoulder, something decided in the gesture. "Then don't just tell me. Show her. That's the only test that actually matters."
Beck thought about that conversation for the rest of the evening, quiet in a way that made Tessa finally ask what was on his mind.
"Your dad told me something," he said. "About you. About what you deserve." He glanced at her, something resolved in his expression. "I'm going to take it seriously. I hope you know that."
"Take what seriously?"
"You'll see," he said, and wouldn't say more, though something in the set of his jaw told her he meant it completely.
Later, over decaf, Beck asked, careful, about the cousins, about the family Tessa had grown up surrounded by, and her mother's face did something complicated, grateful and sad at once, that someone had thought to ask.
"She was the one everyone needed," her mother said, looking at Tessa with something fierce in her expression.
"Every holiday, every emergency babysitting call, every time somebody needed a dish brought or a kid watched so the adults could talk — Tessa was who they called.
Toni got Italy, got treated like the family's whole hope wrapped up in one girl.
Tessa got asked to do the dishes and never once complained about it.
I don't think either of my daughters got a fair deal out of those roles, honestly, looking back on it now.
Toni got put on a pedestal nobody can actually live on forever. Tessa got treated like the help."
"Mom."
"I'm allowed to say it now that we're not all still performing for each other every Sunday." Her mother reached over and squeezed Tessa's hand. "You were never less than her. I hope you know that, whatever the family's math on it used to say."
Later that night, both of them squeezed onto the twin bed in Tessa's old childhood room, the house finally quiet around them, string lights still up on her walls from high school, Beck traced slow circles on her arm and said, "I get it now."
"Get what?"
"Why losing the rest of them hurts as much as it does.
" His voice was quiet, careful, thoughtful in the way he got when he was working through something real.
"This is a lot of love in one house, Tessa.
A genuinely enormous amount, in every direction, no conditions attached to any of it.
I can't imagine losing half of it overnight, the way you did.
I don't think I fully understood the size of what you lost until tonight, seeing what's still here. "
"Yeah," she said, throat tight. "It's a lot to lose. I don't think I've ever fully explained the size of it to anyone before, not even Nina, not really."
"For what it's worth," he said, pressing a kiss to her temple, "I'm not going anywhere near that math, the kind that decides who's worth keeping based on what they can offer.
I already told your dad that, out by the grill.
I show up. That's it. That's the whole deal, forever, if you'll let it be, whatever forever ends up looking like for us. "
She fell asleep in the house she grew up in, in the arms of a boy her whole remaining family had, in their own ways, already claimed as one of their own within a single dinner.
They left the next afternoon, her mother packing them enough leftovers to last a week, her father shaking Beck's hand a beat longer than a handshake usually lasted.
Tessa cried a little pulling out of the driveway, the way she always did now, some permanent low ache for the family that used to fill the whole house instead of just three chairs.
Beck didn't say much for the first hour of the drive, quieter than she'd ever seen him, both hands steady on the wheel, something working behind his eyes that she couldn't quite read.
She let the silence sit for a while, watching the highway markers count down the miles back to campus, before she finally spoke, staring out the window instead of at him, the words coming out simpler than she expected.
"That's all I want, you know," she said.
"Eventually. A degree. A nice job, something I actually built myself.
But most importantly — I want someone to build my own family with.
A real one. Loud, at a table, every Sunday, the way it used to be before everything happened.
I don't know why I'm telling you that in a car on I-90, but I am. "
He didn't answer right away. He signaled, changed lanes, and then, instead of just replying, he pulled off at the next exit entirely, into an empty gas station lot, and put the car in park.
"Beck?"
He turned to face her fully, both hands finding hers across the console, and when he finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual easy confidence in it, stripped down to something raw and unguarded she'd rarely heard from him.
"I want that too," he said. "The exact same thing.
A family, a real one, loud at a table, kids who know they're chosen the second they're born instead of wondering about it their whole lives the way I did.
I've wanted that since before I could even say it out loud, since I was a kid myself, watching other families and aching for something I didn't have words for yet.
" He looked her dead in the eyes, and she watched something in his face crack open completely, no walls left in it at all.
"And it terrifies me. It scares the absolute hell out of me, Tessa, because I don't have a single example of what that's supposed to look like from the inside.
I don't know how to build the thing I want most in the world without a blueprint.
All I know is I want to build it with you.
Only you. That part isn't scary at all. That part is the only thing I've ever been completely sure of. "
She was crying before he finished the sentence, and he reached up and brushed the tears away with his thumb, slow, careful, like he was memorizing the gesture.
"I'm not asking you to promise me anything today," she said, voice thick. "I just needed you to know what I actually want. All the way down."
"I know what I want too," he said. "I just told you. And I'm not scared of wanting it. I'm scared of not being enough to build it right. Those are different fears, and I'd rather have the second one, with you, than the first one with anyone else."
He kissed her then, right there in a gas station parking lot off I-90, slow and certain, and when they finally pulled back onto the highway, her hand stayed in his the entire rest of the drive, both of them quiet again, but a different kind of quiet this time — the kind that didn't need filling.
Building something new instead, strong enough to hold the people who'd actually stayed, and sturdy enough to welcome someone new in without the whole structure feeling threatened by the addition.
She had no idea he was already planning the first of many ways he intended to prove it.
? ? ?
It started three days later, a text with no context beyond clear your whole Saturday.
wear clothes you don't mind getting dirty.
trust me, and Tessa spent the entire week leading up to it in a state of giddy, curious anticipation she hadn't let herself feel in longer than she could remember.
He picked her up at seven in the morning, absurdly early for a Saturday, with a cooler in the truck bed and a look on his face like he could barely contain himself.
"Where are we going?"
"Rock climbing. There's a gym forty minutes from here, real routes, real height, and then after, there's a hiking trail with a view I've been wanting to show you since I found it freshman year.
I know you've never done either. I asked you back in October, remember, the whole conversation about things you'd never tried. "
"You remembered that from October?"
"I told you. I remember everything." He grinned, pulling out of the parking lot.
"Your dad said something to me last weekend that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
About what you deserve. I decided I wasn't going to just think about it.
I was going to start actually doing something about it. "
She was terrified on the climbing wall, hands shaking, twenty feet up with her heart hammering, and he stayed right below her the entire time, calling up encouragement, patient and steady, never once rushing her, never once making her feel small for how long it took her to find her footing.
"I can't do this," she called down, halfway up, frozen.
"You can. You're already halfway there. Just find the next hold. You don't have to see the whole route, Tessa, just the next hold."
She made it to the top, shaking and elated, adrenaline coursing through her in a way she'd never once felt in her carefully managed, responsibility-shaped life, and when she rappelled back down into his arms, he spun her around, laughing, delighted, like her fear conquered was the single best thing he'd witnessed all year.
"You did that," he said, setting her down, hands framing her face. "All you. I was just standing there."
"You were the reason I didn't quit halfway up."
"Maybe. But you're the one who kept climbing.
" He kissed her, slow and proud, right there in the middle of the gym with strangers walking past them, unbothered by the audience.
"This is what I mean. This is what your dad meant.
I want to spend the next however-long finding you a hundred more walls to climb, Tessa.
I want to be the reason you find out what you're actually capable of, instead of just the reason your Tuesdays feel a little less lonely. "
The hike that afternoon ended at an overlook neither of them had words for for a long moment, the whole valley spread out gold and green below them in the late afternoon light, and they sat there together, filthy and exhausted and happier than either of them could remember being in longer than they wanted to admit.
"Best day of my entire life," Tessa said, leaning into his shoulder.
"First of many," he said, and meant it completely.