22. Lucy #3
Lo reached for his hand before he could leave. “Are you feeding yourself too?”
“Yes.”
She gave him a look.
He sighed. “I had a breakfast sandwich.”
“When?”
“Morning.”
“It is currently morning.”
“Early morning.”
Lo’s expression sharpened. “Was the sun up?”
Arlo looked at me. “This is where she gets scary.”
“She learned from me,” I said.
Lo smiled serenely. “Baby, I was terrifying before either of you had teeth.”
Freya lifted her glass. “To Lo.”
“To Lo,” Bea echoed.
Arlo leaned down and kissed Lo’s cheek again, quick and affectionate. “I’ll eat.”
“You’ll sit down for five minutes before the lunch rush,” Lo corrected.
He laughed, and the sound warmed something old in me.
Arlo had lost a mother too. Not in the same way I had, because no two children got abandoned in identical shapes, but close enough that I recognized the wound.
Lo had never tried to fill that space by force.
She had simply kept showing up with food and advice and birthday candles and the exact kind of attention that made absence feel less like an indictment.
Somewhere along the way, Arlo had started letting her love him.
So had I.
Arlo straightened and looked around the table. “Try not to let them bully you too much.” Then he gathered two empty side plates and looked at Lo. “Bill comes to me.”
Lo waved one elegant hand. “Absolutely not.”
“Lo.”
“Arlo James Thomas, I did not put on cashmere and come up to this delightful little snow globe to let you deny me the pleasure of spoiling my girls.”
Arlo’s mouth curved. “Your girls?”
Lo looked around the table, and for one small, dangerous second, the whole igloo seemed to still around her. “Yes,” she said simply. “My girls.”
Arlo’s expression changed first, his teasing giving way to something quieter. “All right,” he said with a shrug.
Lo smiled. “Thank you.”
“But I’m sending dessert anyway.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
Arlo opened the door, letting in a brief swirl of cold and rooftop noise. “I’ll check back.” Then he was gone, stepping into the moving warmth of North Line, already greeting another table before the door sealed behind him.
The restaurant moved around us beyond the transparent walls. Servers crossed the rooftop with trays balanced high. Snow fell in clean white lines through the air. A family in the next igloo laughed over something I could not hear.
Inside ours, Lo reached for the teapot and refilled Bea’s cup.
Freya stole one of my potatoes.
I slapped her hand. “You’re a menace.”
“And yet,” she said, eating the potato anyway, “you love me.”
Bea leaned back, one hand resting lightly over the small curve of her stomach.
For a few minutes, we let the table become easy again.
Lo told us about Dad attempting to help with wedding vendor emails and somehow responding to a florist with a scouting report’s worth of notes about “availability under pressure.” Freya insisted that should be printed and framed.
Bea laughed so hard she had to set down her tea and press both hands under her ribs.
“You cannot laugh at me,” Lo told her. “You are the woman marrying Alois Müller.”
Bea’s smile went soft before she could stop it.
“I know.” Her fingers drifted again to her stomach, but this time they stayed there.
Her thumb moved once over the soft knit of her sweater.
The humor in her face remained, but something beneath it shifted.
She inhaled, then let the breath out with a small, embarrassed laugh.
“Okay.” She looked at Lo first. “I wanted to ask you this somewhere that felt like us,” she started, voice already thickening.
“Not a big dinner. Not in front of everyone. Not with Alois standing behind me looking like he wants to fight anyone who makes me cry.”
Freya pressed a fist lightly against her mouth. Lo’s expression softened completely.
Bea laughed once, watery and annoyed with herself. “And I promised myself I was going to get through this without crying, which was extremely optimistic considering I cried yesterday because Alois labeled a box ‘blankets Bea likes.’”
“He knows you,” Freya offered softly.
“He does.” Bea blinked hard, then looked back at Lo. “But before Alois, before all of this, before I figured out how to stop apologizing for needing people, there was you.”
Lo’s hand went still around her teacup.
Bea swallowed. “You loved me when I was not easy to love.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Lo whispered.
“You did,” Bea said, a tear slipping down her cheek now. She wiped it quickly, then huffed. “I’m blaming the baby for all of this, for the record.”
“Officially noted,” I said, though my own throat had started to tighten.
Bea gave me a grateful look, then turned back to Lo.
“You made room for me before I believed I deserved room anywhere. You fed me. You corrected me. You bought me lipstick before my first college interview because you said confidence could be borrowed.” Her voice shook.
“You became family because you chose to. Over and over again.”
Lo covered her mouth with one hand.
Bea’s tears came harder then, but she kept going.
Brave enough to be messy. Brave enough to be seen.
“So, I know this is not traditional. And I know you’ll tell me I do not need to explain myself because you always do that when I overexplain.
But I want you standing closest to me when I marry Alois.
” She reached across the table and took Lo’s hand. “Will you be my maid of honor?”
Lo laughed first. It broke out of her, half joy and half disbelief, and then it folded immediately into tears.
Real ones. Bright and spilling over before she could pretend sophistication had anything to do with surviving a moment like that.
“Well,” she sniffled, as she pressed Bea’s hand between both of hers.
“There goes my mascara.” Lo leaned forward and cupped Bea’s face with one hand.
“Yes, baby. Of course I will.” Her thumb brushed beneath Bea’s eye. “I would be honored.”
The two of them folded together over the corner of the table, careful of plates and cups and the baby tucked between them in all the invisible ways that already mattered. Lo held Bea like she had been waiting for years to be asked and would have stood there anyway if no one had given her a title.
Freya sniffled beside me. “Oh good,” Freya said, already crying harder. “Excellent. Let’s all dehydrate.”
Bea turned toward us, cheeks pink, eyes bright, one hand still linked with Lo’s. “I know there will be other people involved. Family. Friends. The wedding is going to become a whole production whether I want it to or not because I am marrying a Frosthawk and Lo has already started a binder.”
“I knew you saw it on my desk,” Lo said.
“It was hard to miss,” Bea giggled before shifting to face the table again. “But you three are…” Bea stopped and pressed her lips together for a second. “You are my core. You’re the women I call when I need to be talked off a ledge or handed coffee or reminded I am not in over my head.”
Bea looked at Freya first. “Freya, you make everything feel survivable. You walk into a room and people remember they have bodies and joy and options other than panic.”
Freya’s face crumpled. “That is so mean to say while I’m wearing mascara.”
Bea laughed. “Will you be one of my bridesmaids?”
“Yes,” Freya answered. No hesitation. She leaned across the table and grabbed Bea’s hand.
Then Bea looked at me. The warmth in my chest turned delicate and frightening.