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At the very bottom, under all of them, there’s a stack of blank cards. She finds those last.

“What are these for?”

“Yours. Whatever you make us. Figured we’d fill the rest in.”

Like there’s a we with a whole kitchen and a whole shelf of years in front of it.

She closes the lid and holds the box in her lap with both hands.

“Thank you,” she says, soft.

“It’s got a bad seam on the back.”

“I don’t care about the seam.”

“I know. I just wanted to say it before you found it.”

After, we play a board game Bo picks, one with too many rules that he enforces selectively in his own favor. Olivia takes it seriously, because she takes everything seriously, and she and Bo form an alliance against me that dissolves the second there’s an advantage in betraying each other.

Bo cheats. Openly, joyfully, with a running justification for each new rule he invents. Olivia calls him on every one and loses every argument, because you cannot out-logic a ten-year-old on his home court, and she knows it, and she keeps trying anyway, because losing to Bo on principle is apparently a thing she’s willing to do for love.

And I sit on my own living room floor, losing a children’s board game to the two people I’d walk through anything for, and I think, clear as a bell: I want this. Not for a night. For good.

I’ve spent a decade not letting myself want things in this particular shape. Wanting is how you get left. You want a mother, she goes. You want a father, he never even knew to show up. You want the woman you’re going to marry to stay clean and stay, she stays clean nine months and then just stays gone. I learned to want small. Want a good shift. Want Bo to sleep through the night. Want the fence to hold.

I’m sitting on the floor wanting the whole thing, for the first time in ten years.

I’ve got it half-planned already. Ask the question I already know the answer to. There’s an order to these things. I’ve waited ten years. I can wait a few more months to do it in the right order.

I’m not going to rush it. Everything’s going too good to rush.

Then Bo, halfway through moving his piece, not even looking up, says, “Olivia, can you and Dad get married so you can be my mom?”

To Bo it’s not a bomb. It’s just the obvious next thing, said out loud, because Bo says the obvious thing out loud. It’s the whole way he’s built.

The room stills.

I look at Olivia.

And I watch it happen. The color goes out of her face. Her mouth opens and nothing comes. Her hand, the one that’s been on that painted rock all night, goes still.

She doesn’t answer him.

It’s a second. Maybe two. But I read a room half a beat before everyone else, and what I read on her face is not the thing I want to read. I’ve seen it before. I saw it in a church hallway the day she found out Bo was mine and not my brother. That flicker. That half-step back.

I told myself, back then, it was just surprise. New information, recalibrated fast. I’ve told myself a lot of things in the weeks since, every time it flickered again and she covered it before anyone else could catch it.

“Hey, bud,” I say, easy, tapping the board, pulling his eyes off her before he can notice she hasn’t answered. “It’s your roll. You’re about to land on the good square.”

“The purple one?”

“The purple one.”

He rolls. He lands on the purple one. He whoops. The moment closes over like water, and Olivia laughs at something he says, and the color comes back into her face, and to anyone watching, it’s over.

It’s not over for me.

I keep my hands moving and my face easy for Bo, and underneath it, a cold little thought I’ve been outrunning for weeks finally catches up and sits down next to me.