“Honest, I think,” I said. “For once.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so,” I said. “It felt less like a wound this time. More like checking on an old scar. Still there, doesn’t hurt the same way anymore.”
She pulled me into a hug, the dish towel still bunched in one fist against my back.
“I used to worry I did something wrong,” she said quietly. “Marrying Marcus, blending everything together the way we did. I worried it complicated things for you instead of simplifying them.”
“It gave me an actual father,” I said. “I don’t think that counts as complicated. I think that just counts as lucky.”
She held onto that hug a beat longer than usual, like she needed the extra second to actually believe it too.
Marcus finally brought up the paperwork himself, five weeks after the birthday, on an ordinary Tuesday that had nothing special about it at all.
