Halfway through the film, Lily shifted. It was a gradual migration in my direction until she was leaning against my side, her head near my shoulder and Gerald tucked under one arm. Her eyes never left the screen.
I went very still. My heart did a slow, uneven thud.
Then I put my arm around her.
She didn't react. She just kept watching the film and eating her popcorn, leaning into me as if this was the natural order of things. I sat there in the low light with a five-year-old anchored to my side, feeling something in my chest that was too massive to diagnose.
I glanced at Jack.
He was staring at the screen, but his jaw was tight—the specific tension he held when he was trying not to break something fragile. After a moment, he reached over withoutlooking and took my hand where it rested on the cushion between us.
I looked at our hands. Then I looked back at the screen.
On the television something improbable was happening to a princess. Lily had strong feelings about it and expressed them in a low running commentary that she may not have known she was doing. The popcorn was, as she had predicted, exactly right.
This, I thought.This is the thing.
I didn't have a better word for it than that. Just this—a couch and a film and a small person who had decided I was hers, and Jack's hand in mine in the warm dark, and Cassie's house holding all of us the way a good house did.
This.
* * *
Later, when Lily had been carried upstairs—she'd made it to the credits before going under, which Jack reported as a personal best—I stood in the kitchen and rinsed the popcorn bowl, listening to him moving around upstairs. The quiet sounds of bedtime, the creak of her door, the murmur of his voice.
I dried the bowl, put it away, and stood at the counter for a moment.
Jack came down and stood in the kitchen doorway.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
We'd been saying that to each other a lot lately. It had acquired a different displacement every time—a small, private word that meant more than it said.
"She'll sleep," he said.
"Good."
He crossed the kitchen. I didn't move. He stopped in front of me, planting his hands on the counter on either side of my hips,and just looked at me. He had that same searching intensity he’d carried since Birchwood Lane. Like he was still confirming I was real.
"How are you doing?" he asked. His voice was low, as if tuned specifically for the room.
I gave him an honest assessment. "Good," I said. "Really good, actually."
He almost smiled. "Yeah?"
"Don't make a thing of it," I said.
He did smile then—a full, unguarded one that had been getting easier to find since March. I reached up, resting my hand against his jaw. He turned his face into my palm, just a fraction, and the kitchen went silent.
Outside, Clear Creek was moving through its Friday night. In here, the internal pressure was perfect.
We were fine.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Madison