Chapter 121: The Family We Made

Lara's POV

Marcus and Sarah came the following Saturday with Lily.

Sarah called the morning before to ask if it was too soon, if we needed more time, if they should wait another week, and I told her to come and she said are you sure and I said Sarah please just come and she laughed and said okay, noon, and I said perfect.

They arrived at noon exactly.

Lily came through the front door first the way she always did, without waiting to be formally welcomed, and went directly to find Richie, who heard her coming before she even got inside and appeared from the living room at considerable speed.

They collided in the hallway in the enthusiastic way of five year olds who had not seen each other in what felt to them like a very long time and had approximately seven hundred things to say simultaneously.

The noise level went up immediately.

Sarah came in behind Lily and hugged me at the door, properly, both arms, holding on for a moment longer than a hello hug, and I held on too because sometimes a hug needed to be longer than hello and this was one of those times.

"How are you?" she said when she stepped back.

"Good," I said. "Really good. Come and see her."

Marcus came in last, carrying something that turned out to be a dish of food Sarah had made, which she had apparently decided we needed regardless of whether we had asked for it, and I took it from him gratefully because we absolutely needed it and I had not asked for it and that was exactly the kind of thing you needed people for.

We went into the living room where Damien was sitting with Catherine on his chest, her face turned sideways against him, her small fist curled against his collarbone.

Sarah stopped when she saw them.

Something moved across her face that was warm and uncomplicated and completely genuine.

"Oh," she said quietly.

Damien looked up.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she said.

She came and sat beside him and looked at Catherine properly, the way people looked at new babies, with that particular focused attention that new babies drew from almost everyone without trying.

"She's beautiful," Sarah said.

"She's opinionated," Damien said.

"She gets that from her mother," Marcus said from across the room.

"She gets it from both of us," I said. "Don't let him make it one sided."

Sarah reached out a hand toward Catherine and then looked at Damien.

"Can I?" she said.

"Of course," he said.

She took her gently and held her with the particular competence of a woman who had done this before, who had held her own baby and knew the weight and the warmth of it, and Catherine opened her eyes briefly and looked at Sarah with the same unfocused assessment she applied to everyone and everything and then closed them again.

"She looked at you," Damien said.

"She looks at everyone," I said.

"She looks at everyone differently," he said, with the complete conviction of a man who had been studying his daughter's expressions for a week and had developed strong opinions about their significance.

I decided not to argue with him about this.

Marcus sat beside me on the other sofa and we talked the way we talked when things were normal, easily and without agenda, moving between topics without needing transitions, the comfortable conversation of people who had known each other through enough things that small talk had been replaced by something more honest a long time ago.

He told me about a case he was working on, something complex that he couldn't share details of but that was occupying his mind in the way cases did when they were genuinely difficult.

I told him about the plans for the company, the next phase, the things I had been turning over during the weeks of recovery and rest that had followed everything.

We talked about Ethan, who was upstairs, and about the medical school conversation that had apparently been continuing in various forms between Ethan and Marcus over the past few weeks, Ethan asking questions and Marcus answering them and both of them apparently having decided this was a normal thing to do regularly.

"He's serious about it," Marcus said.

"I know," I said.

"He asked me last week about the different pathways. Not in a casual way. In a this is research I am conducting systematically way."

"That's very Ethan," I said.

"It's very good," Marcus said. "He'll be excellent at it. If that's what he chooses."

I thought about Ethan at fifteen, with his emergency plan and his notebook of things he could do and his laptop camera feeds and his one sock in the hallway at five in the morning.

I thought about Ethan in the hospital room holding Catherine for the first time, saying I've been waiting for you.

I thought about who he was and who he was becoming and the particular pride of watching a person you loved grow into someone you admired.

"Yes," I said. "He will."

In the kitchen, Sarah and Damien were talking.

I could hear their voices through the open door, not the words exactly but the tone, easy and warm, the tone of two people who had found their way to something comfortable after a period of something less comfortable.

I thought about Sarah in the kitchen of this house months ago, standing beside me while Marcus was on the phone with Detective Ade, the quiet way she had said whatever you need, just call me.

I thought about the distance she and I had covered since then, the understanding that had grown between us without either of us making a formal effort toward it, just quietly and naturally, the way the best understandings grew.

Lily appeared in the living room doorway with Richie just behind her, both of them slightly out of breath from whatever they had been doing, and Lily looked at Sarah holding Catherine and went very still.

"Is that the baby?" she said.

"That's the baby," Sarah said.

Lily came in slowly and stood beside Sarah and looked at Catherine with wide eyes.

"She's very small," Lily said.

"She is," Sarah said.

"Smaller than a cat," Lily said.

"Most babies are smaller than cats," Marcus said.

Lily considered this information with the seriousness it apparently deserved.

"Can I hold her?" she asked.

"When you're sitting down," Sarah said. "Come and sit here."

Lily sat beside Sarah with great care and Sarah transferred Catherine into her arms with the same care and Lily sat very still, barely breathing, looking down at this small person in her arms with an expression of absolute solemnity.

Richie stood beside her watching.

"She looked at me when I talked to her," Richie told Lily. "She knows me."

"Can she hear me?" Lily asked.

"Yes," I said. "You can talk to her."

Lily thought about this for a moment.

Then she said very quietly, close to Catherine's face, "Hello. My name is Lily. My daddy knows your mummy. We're kind of like cousins."

I looked at Marcus.

He was looking at Lily with the face of a man who had not anticipated this precise formulation but found it completely accurate.

"Kind of like cousins," I said.

"That's not wrong," he said.

"It's exactly right," I said.

Ethan came downstairs at some point in the early afternoon, drawn by the noise and probably also by the smell of whatever Sarah had brought in that dish, and he came into the living room and said hello to everyone and sat on the floor near where Lily and Richie were now engaged in some kind of negotiation about whose turn it was to talk to Catherine next and he watched them with the expression of someone finding something genuinely amusing and not bothering to hide it.

Marcus sat beside him at some point and they started talking quietly and I watched them from across the room, this man and this boy, the doctor and the almost-doctor-maybe, talking with the ease of people who had found an unexpected connection and were making the most of it.

Damien brought food through from the kitchen at some point, Sarah having apparently reorganised our kitchen in the way Sarah reorganised any kitchen she spent time in, efficiently and without making a fuss about it, and we all ate together in the living room because the table wasn't big enough and nobody wanted to move to a different room.

It was loud and slightly chaotic and someone knocked over a glass of juice and Richie declared that it was David's fault which made no sense but was very on brand, and Lily fell asleep on the sofa at some point and Sarah covered her with a blanket without interrupting any other conversation, and Ethan ate approximately twice as much as everyone else, and Damien held Catherine for most of the afternoon because he was in the stage of new fatherhood where putting her down felt like a mistake.

I sat in the middle of all of it and just looked around.

At this room.

At these people.

At the particular mess and noise and warmth of a Saturday afternoon with family, the real kind of family, the kind that was assembled from love and history and complicated circumstances and a bone marrow donation years ago and a press conference and a safe room and a hallway and all the chapters between the beginning and this one.

Not a perfect family.

Not a traditional one.

Not the kind that looked like anything you could plan for or predict.

But ours.

Completely, entirely, wonderfully ours.

Sarah caught my eye from across the room.

She raised her glass slightly.

I raised mine back.

We didn't need to say what the gesture meant.

We both already knew.