Page 81 of Welded Defender

I swallow. The lump in my throat is big and sweet and not scary. “We saved each other.”

He hums. “That we did.”

Over the last five years I’ve realized that healing doesn’t always feel like angels. It feels like choosing the same small good thing again and again until my bones finally learned it by heart. It feels like Landon’s palm on my back when a door opens and I’m not sure I want to go through. It feels like Wes leaving casseroles and bad jokes on our porch, like Nova showing up with paint swatches and refusing to leave until I picked a color for her bedroom, like Joon changing the oil in my car and installing a dash cam without making a speech about it. Like Becket reminding us to breathe when we are spiralling and Ravi bringing his nephew over to play with Hazel.

Home is a place and a practice. Today it’s a school with a green roof and a chain-link fence and a teacher with kind eyes. It’s a man holding me while we watch our daughter run. It’s the mountains refusing to apologize for how big they are.

“Ready to go buy celebratory muffins?” Landon asks into my ear.

“Bribing me to leave?” I tease, wiping at a tear I pretend is just from the sun.

“Strategic snack diplomacy,” he says. “Ask Wes. It’s a legitimate political strategy.”

I turn in his arms to face him. The years sit kindly on him. His beard is a little thicker, there’s a silver thread at his temple I love too much. When he smiles, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepen in a way that makes something in me relax completely.

“Okay,” I finally breathe, stepping back. “Muffins. And then I’m going to go home and sit on the porch and cry about how big my baby is.”

Landon chuckles. “I’ll join you.”

We start down the steps, the school bell chiming behind us. Every sound, every heartbeat, every small ritual has led us here—to this place where fear is just a ghost of an old story and love is the thing that’s stayed. And I know, fully and without flinching, that the life we built is not fragile. It’s welded, yes, but more than that, it’s alive. It bends, it breathes, it holds. And as the mountains stand watch, I know we’ll keep choosing each other—together—every day.