"There he is," Kraken rumbles, holding his hands out. "There's my boy. Come to Granddad. Come on."
"He's going to cry," Everly warns. "He's in a phase, and he’s pissed off I didn’t take him for ice cream."
"He's not gonna cry for me." Boden immediately cries. Kraken doesn't even flinch. "He's just warming up. We've got an understanding."
Sophie watches the whole thing from the kitchen doorway with a look on her face.
Almost like she’s admiring all of this.
I cross to her and put a hand on the small of her back.
"You okay?"
"I'm watching one of the scariest-looking men I've ever met crawl around my floor barking like a dog to make his grandson laugh," she says. "I'm better than okay. I'm just trying to remember every second of it."
Hannah's the last to arrive, because she texted that she got held up at the library.
When she comes through the door, Sophie crosses the room so fast she nearly takes out a chair.
The two of them hold on a few moments longer than sisters who see each other every week need to.
But here's what nobody outside it understands—they didn't get to see each other every week, for years.
They're making up for a whole stretch of silence the people who were supposed to love them caused.
So they get to hold on as long as they want. Nobody at this table is ever going to tell a Crockett girl to make herself smaller again.
If anyone tries, I’ll personally fucking handle it.
"You found it okay?" Sophie asks.
"Soph, you're fifteen minutes from me. I could find it drunk." Hannah holds up a bottle of wine. "Which—not tonight, I'm driving, but I brought it because I'm not an animal." She clocks the room, the noise, my father on the floor, Bjorn already arguing with Regnor about something, Ma hollering that the cornbread's almost up. Something moves across her face, quickly, before she puts it away. "This is a lot of people."
"Too many?" Sophie asks.
"No." Hannah's voice goes rough at the edges. "No. It's exactly the right amount. I just—we didn't have this, growing up. A loud table. People who showed up." She squeezes Sophie's hand. "Look at you. You went and found us a loud table."
"I found a biker," Sophie says. "The table came with him."
"Best impulse buy you ever made."
We eat at a table I built with Magnus’ help, because a prospect with downtime and a guilt complex learns to keep himself busy, to do something with his hands.
I made it too big on purpose so there'd never be a night somebody didn't fit.
Tonight it's full and it still has room, which is exactly how I wanted it.
Ma's cornbread disappears in about ninety seconds.
Boden ends up on Dad's lap, smiling from ear to ear.
Bjorn tells the story about the time I tried to fix our father's bike at fourteen and nearly took my own thumb off. He tells it loud and wrong on purpose, and I let him, because watching Sophie laugh at the dumb version is worth my dignity any day of the week.
Halfway through, Esperanza texts Sophie, and Sophie reads it under the table thinking I don't notice, and her whole face lights.
"What?" I ask.
"The fund." She turns the phone so I can see, but she's too excited to let me read it. "We got the first one. A teacher in Georgia—same thing, fabricated, they were about to fire her—and Esperanza got therefirst.Before the board could fold. She kept her job, Njal. She didn't have to stand in a parking lot by herself. Because we created something that got there in time."