Kitty groans. “Don’t.”
“He named the new barn cat Kitty Two,” Shay says, looking delighted. “He told Angus it was because the cat reminded him of his wife—small, blonde, and hisses when startled.”
“I do not hiss.”
“You hissed at the toaster last week,” Luna says mildly.
The laughter that fills the kitchen is warm and layered.
Delaney catches my eye with a look that says, this is what you're walking into.
“Five for five,” Shay says, quieter now, looking at me. “Marlie hasn’t missed yet.”
I press the jar to my chest. Around me, the sound of laughter overlaps, filling the kitchen like sunlight. I’ve never been inside a world like this. Never been part of the overlap.
The foster kid inside runs the numbers again. How long until they see through me?
Then Shay puts another scone on my plate, and the calculation keeps returning the same impossible answer:
Stay.
An hour later, Ethan finds me on the porch, sitting on the top step with the jar in my lap and Max asleep against my shoulder. Shay said he’ll only nap if someone warm is holding him. She might have made that up, but I don’t care because this baby weighs almost nothing, and his fist is curled around my collar. I have never held anything this small and this certain.
Ethan stops at the bottom of the steps, looking at me, the baby, and the jar.
His whole expression shifts, becoming tender and aching, so full of want that I have to look away. If I don’t, I'll say something that sounds like forever, and I’m not ready to risk saying that word out loud.
“You told them.” My voice is thick. I don’t specify what, but he knows.
He sits on the step below me, tipping his head back until it rests against my knee. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t ask me first.”
“No.”
“They made me a jar, Ethan.”
His hand finds my ankle, wrapping around it, and his thumb traces the bone in small circles. “Kitty likes to help. They all do.”
I press my lips to the top of Max’s head to avoid saying something reckless. The biggest thing anyone has ever done for me happened in a conversation I wasn’t part of, and the evidence is a jar and four women who said, “Sit down.”
Ethan’s head is warm against my knee. Max’s soft little breaths are the only sound.
In the truck on the way home, my hand turns palm-up on the console. He takes it and holds on. The jar sits in my lap, warm where my body has heated the glass. Outside, the valley rolls past in gold and green, and neither of us speaks because the silence is full enough.