Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 49385 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 247(@200wpm)___ 198(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49385 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 247(@200wpm)___ 198(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
“Welcome to Saint Pierce, Everett,” I tell him. “We’re going to like it here.”
Behind me, Melanie stands in the doorway, hair up, a towel slung over one shoulder like a flag. She looks at us like I’ve given her a thing I didn’t know I had in my pocket.
Outside, the street brightens. The city goes about its business. Somewhere, Hale and Mercer are walking themselves into a tidy corner. Duke and Gunner are two steps ahead with a folder full of boredom on purpose. Dean is drafting a transfer letter that will sit in a frame I’ll pretend not to hang.
In here, my son sleeps in my arms and the woman I love leans her head on my shoulder and laughs at nothing because sometimes safety sounds like that.
Closure isn’t a door slamming. It’s a wedge under the one that matters and the choice to stay.
“Hey, Ev,” I whisper, because it feels important to announce it. “Your dad lives here now.”
He sighs, a small, satisfied sound. I take it as permission and promise all at once.
22
Melanie
Snow turns Saint Pierce into a postcard again, the good kind—the one with glitter that doesn’t shed and a sky the color of a promise. Our window is a frame for twinkle lights and neighbor laughter, and in here it smells like cinnamon, lemon peel, and the new, warm note of baby.
Everett—Ev for short—sleeps on my chest in reindeer pajamas, one tiny fist curled at my collar like he’s keeping me. Lucas pads through the apartment in thick socks and a T-shirt, tucking the throw tighter around us, checking the wedge with a nudge of his foot because traditions matter.
Our tree hums on its timer. Front and center hangs a clear glass lemon ornament, and beside it a new one we bought that says Baby’s First Christmas: Everett Leo in my crooked gold paint. The sticky notes are still on the fridge—Ask, don’t assume. Let him help. Today we added a third, written in Lucas’s tidy print: Build here.
“This,” I tell the sleeping burrito of a person I made, “is what happily ever after looks like. It’s not quiet; it’s not perfect; it’s… ours.”
From the kitchen, Lucas says, “Copy,” like he means it. He’s stirring cocoa and doing that thing where he narrates for the baby in a low voice. “Today’s weather: gentle flurries, barometer steady, high probability of snacks.”
It’s been a handful of bright, blurry days since the blizzard birth, and life has shifted without creaking. The men who haunted our edges turned out to be more smoke than fire. Mercer tried to cash out with his buyer and discovered what the boys call “a folder of boredom” waiting for him—process screenshots, public routes, and a watermark that led right back to the media shop’s LLC. Hale, our third shadow, lifted the decoy like a pro on a camera we owned, then ghosted west when it became clear the only story to sell was we take care of ours. No tabloid exposés. No podcasts with dramatic minor chords. Just a tidy cease-and-desist, a quiet retraction from a gossip site that realized discovery would be ugly, and a string of emails from legal teams that read like snow shovels scraping a drive.
Duke and Gunner dropped cinnamon rolls and a wink the morning it wrapped. “No fireworks,” Duke said, stealing a glance at Ev as if he might assign him a call sign. “Just lights that stay on.”
I tuck that line away because it feels like the point of everything.
Lucas made his move, too. The transfer letter sits—framed, because we’re both saps—on the shelf above the books we picked out in that bookstore the day he pretended not to love first editions. Maddox Security, Saint Pierce Post — Alpha Team: L. Lawson (he says it still surprises him to see his name there; it doesn’t surprise me at all). When he read it out loud to me, voice steady, Ev snuffled like he approved and I cried like a person who finally put down a bag she didn’t know was heavy.
“Hydration,” Lucas says now, handing me cocoa and sliding onto the couch so our knees touch. He brushes a knuckle over Ev’s cap, then my cheek, looking at us with that stunned gratitude that hasn’t worn off for either of us.
“Captain Safety,” I say, and he grins, softer than the first time he wore the title.
There’s a knock at the door, and Lucas gets up to get it. Amelia breezes in with a tin of cookies and the kind of feral joy only an aunt can weaponize. Mom’s behind her with the roast she insists “evokes the spirit of Christmas” and a stack of Tupperware I will never return to her original satisfaction.
“Let me hold my grandchild,” Mom says, already reaching, and Lucas executes a textbook handoff, eyes tracking, hands sure. He checks the wedge without making it a production, and Mom pretends not to notice and then kisses his cheek for the fifth time this week. Amelia documents the moment for the group chat with the caption