Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
I shot him a look.
“Sharing your kids is in your future.”
“Why is it?”
“Unless their parents––”
“The hypothetical people,” I made sure.
“Yes,” he said, chuckling, kissing my forehead. “Unless their parents live in Chicago too, the best we’re gonna get is alternating holidays.”
“Then we’ll have to move wherever our kids are.”
He squinted at me. “Is it fair to move across the country and guilt your kids into spending time with us when they will have new friends, new experiences to discover?”
“So that’s it, then? They move out and we’re just done?”
“Well, yeah,” he said softly. “I mean, it was weird when my folks finally sold their house, but really, they should have done it years ago.”
“Samuel Thomas Kage, I am not going to sell my house,” I announced, outraged.
He cleared his throat and pressed his lips together tight so he wouldn’t laugh in my face. I knew him. I knew he was being very careful of my feelings. Once he could speak without cracking up, he coughed softly and smiled at me. “We won’t sell the house. I love this house, but we can agree it needs updating, and now we can do that.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“I mean, the kitchen is really dated. That’s a lot of dark brown wood in there.”
I nodded.
“And the backyard, other than the big oaks and Hannah’s herb garden, needs some changing. We have a lot of mud in the winter, and I think if we did some remodeling, like a path and more annuals, it would be better.”
“It would.”
“And we need more flowers back there, specifically for the bees.”
“That’s true.”
“We always talk about putting up large birdhouses for the small birds that don’t migrate in the winter, but we never have time,” he reminded me. “Now we will.”
“Okay.”
“And you always wanted that guest bedroom to look like something out of Architectural Digest and the guest bathroom down here to look like it belongs in an upscale Mediterranean restaurant,” he teased me. “Well, now you can.”
“Now I can,” I repeated.
“You’ve been so focused on other people for a long time, and guess what, now you can focus on traveling and fixing up the house, and when we go, Hannah will be in town, so she can come by and visit Chilly and Dobby.”
I nodded.
“Or we can take Dobby, like we will on the weekends, and that’ll be fun too.”
I was at the sniffling phase now. “We’ll take Dobby?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, like that only made sense. “He’s small. We can stuff him into a backpack, and people love him. Plus he’s not annoying—most of the time—so he can go everywhere.”
And that made me smile, and I could finally breathe.
“Chilly’s an old man. He needs to stay home and just take it easy.”
He did. That was true. He still slept on our bed every night, along with the dog, but his sleeping schedule was now like a male lion. He woke up for a short time at night and for meals, but the majority of his day was spent sprawled out on the window box in Hannah’s room because the sun was there from early in the morning until around noon. He moved then, to the window box in our room where I read in the winter, propped up on a pillow and swaddled in blankets. In the summer, it was like a mini oven, and I wasn’t a fan. But Chilly loved it, and that was where he moved, following the sun. Dobby brought him things during the course of the day and deposited them wherever he was. In the evening, they ran around the house together, playing for a couple of hours until Chilly was ready for bed.
“I, for one, am really happy for Jake.” He kept talking as I got up and started washing my face. My eyes were puffy and red from crying. “He’ll be in California, so he can see his mom sometimes, and his sister and his niece. That’ll be good.”
“Yeah, but for holidays and things he probably won’t come back here to see us.”
Sam scoffed. Loudly. “Lemme understand your thinking here. You’re saying a kid that has basically been at our house night and day since he was four is suddenly not going to want to come here?”
He was right, it wasn’t likely.
“I mean, you’re saying when we send his plane ticket along with Kola’s, he won’t want to come?”
There was that.
“I’m just so pleased that the musketeers will remain together. That makes me very happy.”
He lost me. “I’m sorry?”
“Did you not hear Harper’s news as well?”
I might have tuned him out, lost in losing the last kid, who wasn’t technically mine, from my nest. “No. What?”
“Harper is going to transfer to Stanford as well since, much like Hannah, he’s not looking to be without a safety net just yet.”
That news made me very happy. I loved Jake, I did, but Kola was the grown-up between them, meaning if there was a crisis in Kola’s life, he’d sort of have to navigate it alone. But if Harper was there…he could lean on Kola, and Kola could also lean on him. Harper was so smart, so logical, and mostly, if he was in over his head, he’d call for help. At the moment, Jake was the guy you had fun with, Harper was the one with the safety net, and Kola was the one who steered wherever they were going. It was why the three of them had always been so solid. Everyone had a role.