Chapter 213

Breakfast is the best it has been in weeks.

I know this because Tyler is arguing with Lucas about something that happened in a video game and my mother is laughing at both of them and my father is reading the paper with the fake seriousness of a man pretending not to find the argument funny. The kitchen smells like the good coffee and the eggs that the cook does with the herbs from the garden, and for the first time in twenty-two days the morning feels like a morning rather than a holding pattern.

I watch Tyler steal the last piece of toast from Lucas’s plate and Lucas’s subsequent outrage and I feel something warm and entirely uncomplicated settle in my chest.

Selene is at the end of the table with her coffee, looking at everyone and interacting whenever she can. After the laughter dies down, she clears her throat.

“We’ve decided to stay,” she says, looking at my father. “We’ll cancel the trip, or at least postpone it. Nora and the kids need people around