Chapter 239 The Party
ADRIANA
The decorations had gone up the night before, which meant that by the time morning came the house looked like something the twins had designed themselves — loud, excessive, and completely wonderful.
Leo had been up before anyone, which I only discovered because I nearly tripped over a stack of gift bags he’d left at the bottom of the stairs. Hazel had stayed after all. The twins had made the decision for her the moment they’d found out she was considering leaving, and there was simply no argument to be had after that.
We went up together — Leo, Hazel, and I — and stood outside the twins’ door.
“Ready?” Leo said.
“They’re definitely already awake,” Hazel murmured.
I pushed the door open and we walked in singing, and the room erupted immediately. Lorain was already sitting up in bed, grinning so wide it looked like it might hurt, and Elijah junior — who had clearly been pretending to be asleep — burst out laughing before we’d finished the first line. Liam sat bolt upright with his hair going in four directions and let out a noise that was somewhere between a cheer and a battle cry.
They flew off the bed before the song was done. The cake nearly didn’t survive it.
I caught Elijah junior by the shoulders and held his face in my hands for a second. “Happy birthday, my love. I need you to know how completely impossible my life would be without you.”
“Impossible in a good way?” he asked.
“Impossible in every way.”
He grinned and tried to wriggle free and I let him go.
Leo’s voice came from behind me. “You’re both old enough now that I’m legally allowed to chase you around the house. Mum said so years ago.”
Liam turned to me with enormous eyes. “You said that.”
“I absolutely did not—”
“You did,” Elijah junior confirmed. “You said when we were old enough. We’re old enough.”
“That was a slip of the tongue and you both know it and you stored it away like little criminals.” I pointed at them. “No one in this house is chasing anyone with anything. There is no age at which that becomes acceptable.”
“Is the Queen going back on her word?” Leo said, stepping up beside me with a completely straight face.
I turned and looked at my fifteen-year-old son, who was approximately the same height as me now and deeply aware of it. “You are on very thin ice.”
He grinned. Lorain thought this was the funniest thing she’d ever witnessed. Even Lana, who was in the bouncer in the corner and had been watching the whole thing with wide, confused eyes, let out a sound that was almost definitely a laugh.
“Presents now or at the party?” I asked before anyone could restart the debate.
“NOW.” Both twins, simultaneously, at full volume.
“Then someone tell me why there’s a pile of rotten meat in the corner of your room,” I said.
They looked at each other, then at me, then bolted for the door.
I stood in the middle of their empty room for a moment and breathed.
Just yesterday they had been newborns laid in the same crib because they refused to sleep apart. Adrian and I had spent the first three months operating on no sleep and a shared terror that we were doing everything wrong. Now they were filling a house with noise and arguments over trousers and I couldn’t slow any of it down.
“They’re going to make Lana’s life spectacular,” Hazel said from the doorway.
“They’re going to make Lana’s life chaos,” I said.
“Same thing.” She smiled. “Lorain’s already teaching her how to pull Leo’s hair. I saw it yesterday.”
I laughed, and it felt like something releasing that had been wound tight for days.
The party was set for noon, which gave us two hours to get three children dressed and presentable, which turned out to be exactly ninety minutes too little time. The twins’ friends started arriving while Hazel was standing in the hallway outside their room listening to them scream at each other about a pair of trousers.
I got there on a run.
“What is happening?”
They were both gripping opposite legs of the same pair of dark trousers, red-faced and completely committed to the argument.
“He took it off my bed—”
“It was on my bed first—”
“You sleep in the same bed!” I looked from one to the other. “You physically share a sleeping surface! How does either of you have a bed that belongs only to you?”
“It was on my side—”
“ENOUGH.” I didn’t shout often, but when I did, it worked. They both froze. “You are identical twins. The clothes are the same size, same color, same everything. There is another pair of those trousers in your wardrobe and I need one of you to go and get them right now.”
They paused, then Liam let go, turned, opened the wardrobe, and pulled out the second pair.
I stared at him.
He stared at me.
“How long have you known those were in there?”
He said nothing.
I pointed at the door. “Both of you. Dressed. Downstairs. Five minutes.”
I backed out and nearly walked into Leo in the hallway. “Handle them,” I said, and walked away before he could argue.
Guests had been arriving and I moved back to the door to welcome the kids and their parents. I’d grown up in a house where birthdays were a quiet, unremarked thing — Lisa’s came first in the year so she was celebrated, and mine was treated as an afterthought.
I’d made a decision before Liam and Elijah Junior were born that every child in this house would know what it felt like to be the center of something good on the day they arrived in the world. It mattered to me in a way I didn’t always have words for.
The twins came down twenty minutes later, both dressed, both smiling, whatever had happened upstairs apparently resolved by whatever Leo had said to them. I made a mental note to ask him later.
The party was loud and fast and full. I stood off to the side for a while and just watched them tearing through the garden with their friends, Lorain holding her own with the older kids with the confidence of a child who had grown up outnumbered and learned to hold her ground, Leo running a laser tag circuit that had about twelve children screaming at once.
At some point Elijah junior detached from the group and made his way over to me, pressing against my side like a much smaller child.
“I’m thirsty,” he announced.
A glass of water appeared within thirty seconds. He drank it and then stayed, leaning against me with the ease of a child that wasn’t self-conscious about wanting to be near his mother.
“Don’t you want to go back?” I asked.
He looked at the group, then at Lana in her carrier beside me, then back at the group. “I’ll stay here for a bit. Lana looks like she needs company.”
Lana looked absolutely fine. But I put my arm around him anyway and didn’t push him back toward the noise.
Across the garden, Leo was laughing — actually laughing, in the full unguarded way he didn’t always let himself — as he chased a group of seven-year-olds with a laser gun.
He was still a kid. Fifteen and carrying more than he should, sitting up with me at two in the morning talking about Elijah and power and what it meant to do the right thing when it was hard. But right now, in this moment, he was just a boy at his brothers’ birthday party having fun.
I wanted to hold that image, to press it somewhere it would keep.
Elijah should be here. That thought moved through me.
I looked at Lana, who was watching the chaos with enormous eyes and occasional small sounds of bewilderment, and I thought, your father would love this. He would be in the middle of all of it, and you would have fallen asleep on his chest by now.
I held her a little closer and stayed until the sun started going down and the garden lights came on and the noise showed absolutely no sign of stopping.