Chapter 27
Summer
Beck signed with the minor-league affiliate in May, a team three hours away, and spent the first two weeks of summer at rookie camp before driving up to New Jersey for what free days he could piece together, staying in the Marchetti guest room under her father's watchful but increasingly fond supervision.
It wasn't the summer either of them had pictured a year earlier, back before contracts and distance were real things they had to plan around instead of abstract fears to spiral about.
But it was theirs, built deliberately instead of assumed, and Tessa found she didn't mind the shape of it nearly as much as she'd once feared she would.
"I have an update," he told her on one of his first drives up, entirely too pleased with himself. "Gerald has a girlfriend now. I've named her Priscilla. They're very happy. I check on them when I'm in town."
"You still keep track of the campus cats."
"Some things are non-negotiable, Tessa. I have priorities." He grinned, easy. "Gerald would want you to know he approves of the summer arrangement."
"Tell Gerald I said thank you for his blessing."
"I will. He's very invested in us, honestly. More than some people."
She laughed, and thought, not for the first time, that this was exactly the kind of small, ridiculous consistency she'd never once had with anyone before — a boy who'd kept the same silly habit going for an entire year, through everything, just because it was his, just because it made her laugh.
He helped her father replace a section of fence in the backyard during one of his visits, the two of them working through a hot Saturday afternoon, Tessa watching from the porch with lemonade and feeling something settle deep in her chest at the easy, wordless competence of it, two men who'd decided, without much discussion, that they liked each other.
"Your dad likes me," he told her one night, smug, lying in the grass in the backyard after the fence was finished, both of them staring up at a sky full of stars that had nothing on the meteor shower but were beautiful anyway.
"My dad likes everyone who says please and thank you and helps with yard work. Low bar, historically."
"I cleared a low bar. I'll take the win."
She laughed, and he pulled her closer, both of them lying in the grass of a backyard that had, over the last year, slowly become half his too, without either of them ever formally deciding it should.
"I've been thinking about the logistics," he said, quiet, after a while.
"Three hours isn't nothing, but it's not impossible either.
I get two days off most weeks during the season.
I want to use both of them driving here, or you driving to me, whichever works better most weeks.
I know it's not the easy version of this.
I know some people would say long distance never actually works. "
"What do you think?"
"I think I've never once, in my whole life, wanted to build something permanent with anyone before you.
I think distance doesn't really matter when it's the right thing, when both people actually show up for the driving instead of just talking about it.
I think I want to keep hearing about your student teaching placement over video calls, and keep showing up for every single one of your finals week breakdowns, and keep being the reason you drive three hours on a Friday even when you're exhausted, because I'll be doing the exact same thing right back. "
She rolled onto her side to look at him properly, the stars forgotten.
"Yeah," she said, simple and certain. "Let's do that.
Let's build the thing, distance and all.
" They lay there for a long time after that, not saying much else, just existing together under a summer sky, and Tessa thought about how far she'd traveled from a girl in a half-packed bedroom promising herself she'd build a life entirely alone, brick by brick, letting no one close enough to take anything from her ever again.
She hadn't built it alone, in the end. She'd built it with exactly the people who'd refused to let her try, and now she was learning to build it across three hours of highway too, deliberately, on purpose, every single week.
That, she understood now, watching a shooting star cut across the New Jersey sky, hadn't been a failure of the plan.
It had been the whole point, the part she hadn't known to hope for when she made the promise in the first place.
? ? ?
A year later, almost to the day, Tessa stood in her parents' kitchen watching sauce simmer on the stove, Sunday dinner underway the way it had been since she was a child, except the table now had a different shape to it than it used to, fewer chairs pulled up around it, some empty spaces that hadn't filled back in and, she'd come to understand, probably never would.
Her aunts still didn't speak. She'd stopped expecting that to change, somewhere over the last year, not out of bitterness but out of a hard-won, clear-eyed acceptance that some wounds simply didn't heal on any timeline anyone could plan around, and that waiting for them to close before she let herself be happy would have meant waiting forever, possibly her whole life, for something that might never come.
Mia had texted once more, back in the fall, a birthday message, careful and brief, no real substance to it beyond the gesture itself.
Tessa had answered warmly and left it there, neither pushing for more nor closing the door entirely.
Some doors, she'd learned over the last year, could stay open a crack without needing to be pushed all the way through, without that ambiguity being a failure on anyone's part.
But the table was full anyway, full in a different configuration than the one she'd grown up expecting.
Toni, home for the weekend, deep in an argument with Beck about a hockey call from the night before, both of them equally invested in a debate that would clearly outlast dinner, Beck having driven the three hours from his team's summer facility that morning specifically so he wouldn't miss it.
Nina fielding a barrage of theatrical questions from Angela about her love life, exasperated in a way that fooled no one, her phone lighting up twice during dinner with a text from Jax that made her smile down at her plate before she could stop herself.
Toni trading a private, knowing look with their mother across the table, the two of them having grown closer over the last year in a way that felt like its own quiet repair, even without the rest of the family joining in, a two-person healing that mattered just as much for being incomplete.
Tessa's mother caught her eye from across the kitchen and smiled, the specific, tired, grateful smile of a woman who'd lost half her family and rebuilt a smaller, sturdier one out of whoever had actually stayed, whoever had proven themselves willing to keep showing up.
"You good?" Beck asked, appearing at her elbow, stealing a piece of garlic bread off the counter before she could stop him, the same easy theft he'd been committing at every dinner for two years now.
"I'm good," she said, and meant it, all the way down, no qualification needed. "Better than good, actually."
She thought, sometimes, about the girl she'd been in that dorm room in September, making a vow to build herself out of nothing but her own two hands, so certain that letting anyone close was just another way of handing them the tools to hurt her later.
She understood that girl completely, still carried her somewhere underneath everything else.
She'd needed that armor, for a while. It had gotten her through a year that would have flattened her without it, had done exactly the job it was built to do.
But she understood something else now too, something Beck had shown her one patient, unhurried text at a time, one Sunday pasta dinner at a time, one three-mile midnight run at a time, something Toni had shown her every single time she refused to let Tessa disappear into her own grief no matter how deep it pulled, something Nina had shown her by crossing state lines to keep a promise nobody would have blamed her for breaking, and by keeping a hidden list for a year just in case the truth was ever needed later: that the whole point of building yourself wasn't to make sure nobody could ever get close enough to hurt you again.
It was to become someone strong enough to choose, deliberately, with open eyes and full information, exactly who got to stay.
Not everyone did. Her aunts hadn't. The old version of her extended family, eleven cousins and Sunday dinners that filled an entire house to bursting, hadn't survived intact, and she'd made peace, slowly and imperfectly and never quite completely, with the fact that it might never fully come back, that some losses were simply permanent regardless of how much healing happened around their edges.
But this — this smaller, louder, fiercely chosen version of home, built out of a sister who never once wavered even when it would have been easier to, a best friend who moved four hundred miles to keep a promise and stayed on as her sophomore-year roommate, both of them still splitting rent on the same cramped, chaotic dorm room, and a boy who'd learned her, patiently, one hated body part and one honest conversation and one three-hour drive at a time — this she got to keep, permanently, on her own terms. She went back to stirring the sauce, Beck's arm sliding around her waist from behind, the whole loud, imperfect, thoroughly hers kitchen humming around them, Toni's laugh carrying over the sound of Nina still fielding questions, Nina's phone lighting up one more time with Jax's name, and thought that if Poppi could see this table now, missing the faces it used to have but full of new ones who'd earned their seats the hard way, through actual showing up rather than inherited obligation, he would probably just tell everyone to sit down and eat, that the conversation could wait until after the first plate was finished.
He always did believe the important things got said easiest over a plate of something good, something made with patient hands and golden, not browned, garlic.
She was starting, finally, completely, one year and one boy and one chosen family later, to believe that too.
Across the table, Nina caught her eye, phone still glowing in her lap, and mouthed something that looked suspiciously like he asked me to visit him next month with an expression Tessa recognized immediately, having worn it herself not so long ago — the specific, terrified, hopeful look of someone standing at the very beginning of exactly the kind of story Tessa now knew, better than anyone, was always worth the risk. THE END