“We do?” Otter says. “Well, in that case, we better listen, don’t you think?”
Noah and Lily grin up at us, both almost a spitting image of another Kid that I’d known a long time ago, who’d sat in my lap and told me that everything was going to be all right.
I have to blink away the burn in my eyes, and that is not a good indication of how today is going to go.
Shit.
Otter must see it on my face, because he says, “You guys want to go see if Izzie’s ready to go?” and they’re out the door, hollering down the hallway for their auntie, telling her that Noah’s spleen is infected, but surgery would have to come later because we had to go.
Otter’s hand comes to the back of my neck, and he presses our foreheads together.
“Okay?” he asks me quietly.
I shrug, trying to swallow past the lump in my throat. “It’s just—I’m probably going to be a wreck today.”
He chuckles. “That’s expected.”
“I shouldn’t be. It’s a good thing.”
“It is,” he agrees. “A very good thing. But it’s still a big deal. You’re allowed to be sad, as long as you remember to be happy.”
“I’m not sad. It’s just—it hit me. Now. It’s… a lot.”
“It is,” he says simply.
“I can’t believe it’s happening, you know? I thought he’d—I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m thinking right now.”
His nose scrapes against my cheek. “This isn’t the end, you know? It’s just another beginning.”
I know that. “I wish she was here.”
“Who do—Mrs. Paquinn.”
I nod slowly. “She’d like this. Us. Everything that we’ve become.”
His hand tightens on the back of my neck. “I’m sure she’s watching. Probably laughing at us right now.”
Fitting, that. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
I shrug. “Okay.”
“You ready for this?”
I don’t know if I am, but I say, “Yes,” because that’s what he needs to hear.
THEY’RE WAITING for us downstairs, all three of them. Noah’s wrapped around Izzie’s leg, wrinkling her blue dress, but she doesn’t appear to give a shit about that. Lily’s standing next to Izzie, prim and proper, obviously trying to emulate Izzie’s stance but not wanting anyone to know she’s doing it.
Izzie’s smiling down as Noah babbles at her, telling her that he’s got a big job to do today and that he’s going to be so good at it that everyone will clap for him when he’s done and then he’s going to eat so much ice cream and cake because Papa said he could have whatever he wanted today, even though that’s an outright lie. I’ve seen Noah hopped up on sugar before, and it’s a terrifying prospect.
/> And I know Izzie knows that, but she’s humoring him anyway. She hears us coming down the stairs and looks up at us, winking once before she looks back down at Noah.
The former Izzie McKenna (having been Izzie Thompson now for over four years) has grown up into a beautiful young woman. Her hair is cut pixie short, and much to my and Ty’s chagrin, she has somehow managed to gain an inch or two on us. As of a month ago, she’s a high school graduate, and this is our last summer with her before she moves into the dorms at OSU down in Corvallis, something I’m already dreading. She’s fierce and fiery and able to go toe to toe with Tyson, and I’m going to miss the hell out of her when it’s time for her to leave. But she’s excited about it, having been given a partial scholarship where she’s going to study biology on the way to becoming an entomologist, much to my extreme horror.
It’d been a long road to get her to become ours legally and in name. Physically and mentally, she became a part of us the moment she showed up at our doorstep (and for Tyson, the moment he’d met her on that sidewalk years ago). Her teenage years hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park, but we’d given her the room she needed to grow into her own without feeling like we were stifling her. She’d spent more years on her own than she’d had with a large family, and there were times I knew she felt smothered by all of us. There’d been some rough patches, but that was what it meant to have a family. You took the bad with all of the good.
She whistles at the both of us as we reach the bottom of the stairs. “You guys clean up well, for old guys.”