The apartment is a disaster.
There are toys on the floor and shoes by the door and a sippy cup on the coffee table that I've moved three times and that keeps reappearing because Lily has decided the coffee table is where the sippy cup lives and she is, in this as in all things, immovable. There's a basket of laundry on the couch that I was folding before Ray pulled me into the kitchen to taste his sauce; then Lily needed her shoes tied; then Devon texted that they were running late. The laundry is still on the couch, half-folded, and I don't care.
I don't care. About the laundry. On the couch. If someone had told the Miles Covington of two years ago that he would tolerate unfolded laundry on his couch, that Miles would have requested a psychiatric evaluation.
The apartment isn't the same apartment. Same address, same layout, but everything else has changed. Ray's cookbooks are onthe shelf next to my law texts. His hoodie is on the back of a chair — it's always on the back of a chair, it migrates there no matter how many times I hang it up, and I've stopped hanging it up because the apartment smells like him and the hoodie is part of why. Lily's room used to be the home office — we painted it yellow because she pointed at a yellow paint chip with the absolute authority of a person who has opinions and expects them to be respected. She's been home for a year now and the yellow room has a proper bed and a shelf overflowing with board books and the one-eared rabbit from the center and approximately sixty stuffed animals because Ray cannot go to a store without buying her one.
From the kitchen, I can hear Ray singing. He can't sing. He's been told he can't sing by every person who has ever heard him sing and this information has had zero impact on his behavior. He's making pasta — the same sauce from the first night at his apartment, garlic in olive oil, tomatoes crushed by hand — and he's singing something off-key and Lily is sitting on the counter next to him watching with the grave attention of a food critic evaluating a new restaurant.
"More," she says, pointing at the basil plant. She's a full sentence kid now — three years old and talking constantly — but when it comes to food she reverts to the essentials. More crackers. More pasta. More basil. More of whatever Ray is making because Ray is her favorite person in the kitchen and she is his sous chef and their partnership is the most functional professional relationship in this household.
"More basil?" Ray tears off a leaf and hands it to her. She sniffs it, considers it with the seriousness of a sommelier, and eats it. "That's my girl."
I lean against the doorframe and I watch them and the claiming mark hums and the scar on my ribs is quiet and the apartment smells like garlic and basil and Ray and babyshampoo and I don't move because if I move I'll break whatever spell makes this real.
Ray catches me watching. He grins — that grin, the one I used to find infuriating and now find necessary — and holds out the wooden spoon. "Taste."
I push off the doorframe and cross the kitchen. Lily watches me approach with proprietary suspicion because the kitchen is her and Ray's domain and I'm an interloper. I taste the sauce. It's good. It's always good — somehow, despite everything I know about his general inability to follow instructions, Ray makes perfect sauce every time.
"It needs more salt," I say, because I will never not give a note.
"It does not need more salt."
"Slightly more salt."
"Lily, does the sauce need more salt?"
Lily looks at me. Looks at Ray. "More basil," she says, because she has her own agenda and it is always basil.
Ray laughs and pulls me closer by the belt loop and kisses me. Quick, casual, sauce-flavored — the kind of kiss that happens six times a day and still makes the claiming mark pulse warmly on my shoulder. I catch a glimpse of myself in the dark window over the sink — my reflection with Ray's arm around me and Lily on the counter between us — and for a second I see the mark. The silvery crescent on my shoulder, visible above my t-shirt collar. It healed lighter than I expected. It doesn't look like a wound. It looks like something that was always supposed to be there, as if built into the architecture of my body. Lily's hand on my shirt at the center had felt the same way — inevitable, predestined — and so has Ray's arm around my waist since the first time he put it there.
Lily reaches out and pokes the mark with one finger. She does this sometimes — touches it with the fascinated focus of atoddler investigating something on her parent's body, a mole or a freckle or a scar.
"Daddy's bite," she says matter-of-factly, because Ray taught her that, and I gave up being embarrassed about it months ago.
"Daddy's bite," I confirm.
The buzzer goes. Lily's head whips toward the sound — she's learned that the buzzer means people, and people mean mayhem, and mayhem is her favorite thing.
Devon and Alex arrive first, which means the chaos starts immediately. Gabriel is two and a half now and running everywhere — a small, determined wrecking ball with Devon's dark hair and Alex's serious face — and the second Devon sets him down he makes a beeline for Lily's toy basket and starts removing items with the efficiency of someone clearing a crime scene. Lily watches this from Ray's hip with narrowed eyes. She has opinions about her toy basket.
"Gabe. No." She says it with a calm authority that is, frankly, terrifying from a three-year-old. Gabriel looks at her, considers her position, and removes another toy from the basket. Lily looks at me with an expression that clearly communicatesare you going to handle this or do I have to?
"He's a guest, Lily," I say.
She looks at Gabriel. She looks at the toy he's holding — a stuffed elephant, one of her favorites. She reaches down from Ray's hip, takes the elephant, and replaces it with a different stuffed animal — a bear she's less attached to. Gabriel accepts the trade without protest. Negotiation complete.
"She's going to be a lawyer," Devon says from the doorway, watching this exchange with open admiration.
"She's going to be terrifying," I say.
"Same thing," Devon says, and then grins at me because we've been making that joke since the first time he saw Lily tell Ray to stop singing.
"If they fight, I'm not intervening," Devon says, dropping a bag of empanadas on the counter. "Survival of the fittest. Garcia rules."
"Covington-Garcia," Ray corrects.
"Whatever. The empanadas are still hot, which is a miracle because Alex drives like a grandma."