Page 66

Cleanup begins slowly, everyone moving through the room with the unhurried pace of people who know what happens next. Luca gathers plates, stacking them in a tower that threatens to collapse with every new addition. Harper stacks chairs while pretending not to care, but I notice she’s arranging them in height order without being asked. Liv hasn’t moved from her spot in the armchair, Maisie still asleep against her chest, her hand now resting protectively on the baby’s back.

“I can take her,” I say, already reaching for Maisie.

Liv shakes her head. “We’re good,” she says simply. “She’s out. This is the quietest they’ve been all day.” She smiles, the expression warming her entire face. “Besides, I’m using her as a shield. If I put her down, Clara might actually finish telling me about the drainage problems at the community garden, and I’ve been successfully avoiding that conversation for forty minutes.”

Clara looks up at this, one eyebrow raised. “I’m aware you’re avoiding it,” she says, her voice carrying the same calm, administrative tone she uses for everything. “I’m just being polite.”

“Being polite means not describing pipe diameters in detail,” Liv says. “Twice.”

Across the room, Milo is still playing with his blocks, but his movements are getting slower, his eyelids beginning to droop as the birthday adrenaline finally wears off. He’s been awake since five that morning, opening presents in his pyjamas, singing “happy birthday” to himself in the bath, vibrating with excitement at the café door, and now his tiny body is finally giving in.

He pushes himself to his feet with a wobble, a block still clutched in each hand. He makes it two sleepy steps before his balance disappears completely. Tilting sideways, he stumbles straight into Noah’s legs.

Noah instinctively catches him and lifts him up before he can hit the floor, large hands settling awkwardly around his tiny body as Milo grabs a fistful of Noah’s shirt and simply... melts against him.

One second, two, three.

Eyes closed. Breathing already evening out. The complete, unquestioning collapse of a toddler who has officially decided the party is over.

Slowly, carefully, Noah adjusts his arm to support Milo’s weight, cradling the small body against his chest with the look of someone who understands how precious what he’s holding is. He doesn’t look panicked or overwhelmed or any of the things people feel when a small human suddenly attaches itself to them. He just sits there under the warm café lights, one hand supporting Milo’s back, the other reaching unconsciously to brush a strand of hair from the boy’s forehead, looking for all the world like this is the most natural thing in the world.

I stop scrubbing a plate and look at him. At Noah holding my son, no hesitation or nervous glances toward me for confirmation. Just ease. The kind that comes from genuine comfort rather than practiced competence.

He catches me staring and the corner of his mouth lifts in a small smile. “If you’re judging my baby-holding technique,” he says, his voice pitched low enough that Milo doesn’t stir, “I’d like to formally point out I have not dropped either of them yet.”

I laugh despite myself, the sound bright in the quiet café. “Yet,” I agree. “The day is young.”

Noah’s smile widens, and then he steps toward me, careful not to jostle Milo, and brushes a soft kiss against my forehead, his free hand finding mine for a moment before he turns back to help Luca finish gathering plates.

I stand in the middle of my cafe, coffee-scented, balloon-strewn, full of the people who carried me through the worst year of my life, with dishwater on my hands and icing in my hair and a heart so full it actually hurts, and register something I haven’t felt in so long I almost don’t recognise it.

I am happy. Just happy. Not surviving or managing or any of the careful words I’ve been using to describe my existence since that night when everything fell apart. Happy. Deeply, completely, absurdly happy with a life that looks nothing like the one I thought I was building and somehow, against all odds, is right anyway.

And I am deeply, helplessly in love with a man who doesn’t demand anything from me. Who shows up without being asked. Who holds my children like they’re precious and touches me like I am too and never, not once, makes me feel like loving him costs more than I can afford.

I turn back to the sink with wet hands and a full heart and the strange, wonderful awareness that this is what happens when you stop being afraid of what comes next. The world just keeps turning. And sometimes, against all odds, it turns where you need it to.

Twenty-Two

The living room looks like someone filled a cannon with board books, stuffed animals, and the remnants of breakfast, then fired it directly into the wall. I stand in the doorway for a moment, coffee mug clutched in both hands and try to decide whether this is salvageable or if I should just call for a bulldozer and start over. It’s been twelve months since the twins’ first birthday, and if anything, they’ve only gotten more effective at creating mayhem.

Milo is attempting to climb the bookshelf in the living room with the determination of a boy who has never once learned from consequences. He’s made it approximately sixteen inches off the ground, one small foot wedged into the second shelf, both hands gripping the wood above his head, his entire face set in an expression of absolute, unwavering commitment. I’ve told him approximately one hundred and forty-seven times that the bookshelf is not for climbing. He has nodded solemnly and then attempted it again fourteen seconds later, without even the decency to look sheepish.

“You’re going to fall,” I tell him, setting my coffee down on the side table. “And when you do, the floor is going to win. It always does.”

He turns to look at me, clearly unimpressed by my assessment of his climbing abilities. “I good,” he announces, with the absolute confidence of a two-year-old who believes gravity is a concept that applies exclusively to other people.

“Are you though?” I ask.

Beside him, Maisie stands with her arms crossed and an expression that says she has already filed a formal complaint with management. Her hair is in what can only be described as “controlled chaos,” several strands standing straight up from her scalp, and she’s wearing one sock, the other currently serving as cargo inside one of Noah’s trainers by the front door, an arrangement she clearly considers both necessary and elegant. She glances at me, then back at Milo, raises one eyebrow in an expression so precisely like Luca’s that I nearly laugh, and says, very clearly: “Miles fall.”

“Maisie’s right,” I tell him. “Miles fall.”

“No,” he insists, already turning back to his climb. “I good.”

I let my eyes move around the room; really look at it in a way I don’t usually have time for. There’s evidence of Noah everywhere, not just in his things but in the way they’ve settled into the ecosystem of the house. His worn paperback translations, Italian mostly, though there’s a small stack of Dutch on the bottom shelf, lined up beside my romance novels with their garish covers and earnest declarations. His oversized grey mug sitting next to my smaller one on the drying rack, the chipped handle facing out, the way I always turn it. A pair of men’s trainers by the front door that Maisie has placed one of her socks inside, the tiny purple polka dots visible against the dark interior like an intentional contrast.

And in the kitchen, an entire cupboard quietly colonised by his collection of loose-leaf teas, about thirty different varieties, each one labelled in his careful handwriting, that I find both baffling and endearing. I don’t understand tea people. I never have. But Noah with his earl grey and his lapsang souchong and his insistence that yes, they really do taste different, and no, I can’t just add honey and milk and call it done, makes me smile every time I open that cupboard.