Page 62 of Devoured

Friday night was pizza on the floor.

It had been the ritual for four years — Friday nights with the kids, sacred, the pizza eaten off the coffee table and the living room floor, a movie the kids fought over and Levi always won, pancakes if anybody was still hungry after. It was the thing Dean had built out of the wreckage, the one evening of the week that had stayed whole when everything else broke, and he had not once let anyone into it who wasn't family.

Addi walked into it like she'd been coming for years.

She fought Levi over the movie and lost on purpose. She ate pizza off the floor in her ridiculous dress. She did all the voices when Giana, unbelievably, asked her to read the back of the DVD case out loud, and Dean caught Lara's eye over the kids' heads and saw that she'd heard it too — Giana's true laugh, the one he could count on one hand the times he'd heard it this year — and that it had got her the same place it got him.

By the end of the movie Levi was asleep with his head in Addi's lap and his feet in Lara's, and Addi had gone quiet for the first time all day, her hand resting light on the boy's hair, looking down at him with something soft and unguarded that the loud version of her kept covered the rest of the time. She looked up and caught Dean watching and didn't perform anything at him for once.

"He's a good kid," she said, quiet.

"He is."

"They both are." She looked over at Giana, conked out against Lara's side. "She's going to be a force, that one. The quiet ones always are." A beat, still stroking Levi's hair. "Lara's good with them."

"I know it."

"No," Addi said, and there was something under it now, the sister surfacing through the showman. "I mean she's good with them. I've watched my sister keep the whole world at arm's length for a year. She doesn't do that here." She looked at him, and for one second all the noise dropped out of her and what was left was sharp and serious and aimed. "Don't be the thing that teaches her she was right to."

Dean held her eyes. He thought about the wall he'd drawn on a kitchen table, and the thing he'd asked Lara for in the dark after the barbecue, and the gap between the two that he had not yet found the courage or the words to close.

"I'm working on it," he said, which was more than he'd said out loud to anyone.

Addi studied him a second longer, then nodded once, satisfied or close enough, and the showman came back up over the top of her. "Good. Because I will drive back here, and I’ll be so annoying about it."

"I believe you."

"Everybody does. It's my gift."

He did the dishes after, because somebody had to, and that was how Lara found him, alone at the sink, sleeves shoved up, the house gone quiet around them.

She came up behind him without a word and slid her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek flat to his back, between his shoulder blades, and just held on. He stood there with his hands in the dishwater and felt the whole warm weight of her against his spine and didn't move for a second, because moving would end it.

Then he set the plate down. Turned in her arms. Got a wet hand under her jaw and tipped her face up, and she was looking at him with everything in it, the long good day and the sister and whatever she'd understood about him in the kitchen, and he kissed her — slow, deep, his thumb at the corner of her jaw, her fingers curling into his shirt — and felt her go soft against him, and forgot for a second that there was a single other thing in the world besides this.

"LARA." Levi, from the living room, at the volume of a struck bell. "ADDI SAYS YOU HAVE TO COME SEE THIS."

Lara dropped her forehead to Dean's chest and laughed.

"To be continued," she said.

"Counting on it." He let her go, reluctant, his hand trailing off her last, and she went to see whatever it was, and Dean stood at the sink with his pulse going and watched her cross his living room into the lamplight where her sister and his children were waiting for her, and thought that he had built this whole careful life to never need anybody, and that it had stopped working sometime in the last two months, and that he no longer entirely wanted it to.

She went back to Elena's late, because Addi was set up on the pull-out a few feet from her own bed, and the first night of a visit was not a thing you spent away from your sister.

Lara lay in her own bed over the garage with Addi's familiar breathing coming from the pull-out a few feet away, a sound she hadn't slept beside in years, a sound out of a childhood of shared rooms and whispered late nights, and stared up at the dark ceiling, and did not, for once, run any numbers.

She just lay there full to the top with it. The day of it. Addi in the kitchen with Helen. Giana asking about the hair. Levi asleep across both their laps. Dean's wet hand under her jaw and his mouth and the helpless way he'd looked at her, and underneath all of it the quiet enormous fact she'd been afraid to test and had tested today and found true: that the loud bright beautiful sister had walked into the room, and the man hadn't looked, not once, not the way she'd braced for her whole life.

And that was the moment the other thing arrived, the thing she'd been holding off at the edge of every good day for weeks, arrived quietly, in the dark, with no way left to argue it down.

She was in love with him.

Not falling. Not sliding toward it. In it, all the way, past the point where she could have called it anything smaller. She loved his children. She loved his terrifying housekeeper and his loud sister of a sister and the whole loud broken mended family she'd somehow been folded into. She loved the man who'd carried her over his shoulder like a sack of feed and the man who'd held her after the barbecue like she already belonged and the man who couldn't look away from her in a room full of people. She was so far in she couldn't see the edge of it anymore.

And he had told her, in plain words, at her own kitchen table, that there was a wall at the end of this. No marrying again. No more of any of it. Nothing past this. She'd heard him. She'd said she could live with it. She'd believed, right up until tonight, that she was a grown woman enjoying a good thing with her eyes open and no illusions.

Lying in the dark with her sister breathing a few feet away, Lara understood that she’d been lying to herself the same careful way she'd once lied about being okay, and that when this ended, when the wall finally came down on it the way he'd promised it would, she had no earthly idea how she was going to survive walking away from it.