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“I can’t find my green shoes. Have you seen them?”
“I think they’re in the garage, sweetie,” I call back, clearing my throat.
“I already looked there.”
“In the bag with your swimming gear, not near the doorway.”
There’s a pause. “Oh! Thanks!” And then I hear her running through the house, presumably back toward the garage.
“She loves those shoes,” Reid says, chuckling.
I shrug, running my hands over my dress, still feeling a little mentally flustered. “Which I normally don’t have an issue with, but she has such a cute dress picked out for tonight and…neon green sneakers?”
My husband laughs again and shrugs. “Funky is just her vibe. She takes after her mom.”
I chuckle and press a kiss against Reid’s lips. “Don’t I know it.”
Crossing the room, I slip on a pair of pumps before turning to look at myself in the mirror again. Then my gaze snags on the sight of Reid tugging on his jacket, and my head tilts to the side as I drink him in.
“That suit still looks great on you,” I say, watching as he walks toward me.
“You say that every time I wear it.”
I grin. “Because it’s true every time you wear it.”
I reach out, adjusting the knot of his tie, my mind wandering back over the other times he’s worn this navy blue suit.
The first time—the reason he bought it in the first place—was our wedding. It was a tiny affair, just our family at a smallceremony in my parents’ back yard a few months after Reid proposed. We considered planning a full wedding, inviting half the town, blah blah blah, but when we actually thought about the logistics, it sounded like a lot of fluff that we didn’t need. So instead, we kept it tiny, and we each picked one thing to splurge on. For me, it was a really good photographer to capture the important moments. For Reid, it was his suit.
Since then, he’s worn it to any nice occasion we’ve been to, like Rusty and Bellamy’s wedding a few years ago and his twenty-year high school reunion last year. He looks just as good now as he did the first time he wore it. Maybe even better, especially with that little bit of gray coming in at his temples and along the edges of his mustache.
Once we’re ready, I go in search of Junie, who I find sitting next to the fireplace, her little legs dangling over the couch as she watches TV, our aging Sydney snuggled up at her side.
Our pup is a bit too old to be sneaking out of the house anymore. Reid finally figured out how she was escaping from the blue cabin all those years ago by setting up Junie’s baby monitor to watch her, and we couldn’t believe it when we saw the video of Sydney hopping up and shoving the sliding door open all by herself, then nudging it closed once she was outside. The little escape artist. Apparently, she could have lived another life as a trained show dog.
Junie’s head snaps to the side when I walk into the living room, and she lifts one leg dramatically into the air, showing off her bright green tennies. “Found ’em!”
I grin. “Awesome. Are you ready to go?”
Junie nods and jumps off the couch, turning to pet Sydney and give her a kiss before following me to the door.
“Jacket,” I say, pointing to Junie’s winter coat hanging by the door as I pull on my own.
“Alright, let’s get to this fancy ‘Christmas dinner’,” Reid says, smirking and using air quotes.
I purse my lips and Junie cackles as we follow him out to the car, a dark blue SUV we bought after his truck finally broke down a few months ago.
“He totally knows about the party,” Junie whispers loudly as we round to the passenger side, her breath coming out in a fog against the cold evening air of late December.
I wrinkle my nose and she giggles, but we stop talking as we hop into the car and Reid blasts the heat, giving the windshield a chance to defog for a few minutes before we pull out on the long gravel drive that leads to our cabin in the woods.
After Reid and I got married, Junie and I moved into the blue cabin, the three of us beginning our life as a family in the same place where we fell in love. About a year in, we realized we wanted something bigger. It took a few years of saving, but eventually we found a spot in the northwest corner of the lake. A single story with three beds, two baths, and a den. Most importantly, it has a property line that touches water. That’s why it took so long for us to find the right spot, because we both knew we wanted to be on the lake. After Reid got the right permitting to build a dock, we were in heaven.
It’s so wild to sit on our back deck during the summer with Sydney, watching Reid and Junie in the water. My mind almost always drifts back to years ago, to the days when he spent hours teaching her to swim. Now he’s her father, the man who has shown her consistency and stability and never fails to show up for her.
After Reid and I had been married for a year—a time period during which Jay didn’t visit or call once—he asked how I’d feel if he adopted Junie. I cried, because I was so overjoyed and overwhelmed in the same breath. Then Reid contacted Jayhimself and handled it all. Getting his permission, the legal paperwork, the appointments with the court…all of it.
The day everything was finalized felt like a new beginning, for all of us. It’s strange to think there everwasa Jay to begin with. He might have been Junie’s father, but Reid hasalwaysbeen her daddy.
