Page 112 of Crosscurrent

"Tell him he can have the credit," Cara said, "if he promises never to do it again."

A silence on the line. Then Reagan, quieter, in a voice with all the armor off: "I'm not leaving him down here alone. I'm staying till he can travel."

"I know you are," Cara said. It wasn't a declaration. It wasn't the word neither of them had said out loud yet, the one the Bible kept promising for later. It was just Reagan, naming where she'd chosen to stand. It was enough, and they both let it be.

It was that evening, in the basement, that the family did the thing the whole long brutal year had been quietly building toward, which was choose itself on purpose.

They drifted down into the basement out of habit, the repaint-it-someday basement that ran the cover business and had somehow become the truest room any of them had. Owen turned an empty coffee mug in his hands. Skye sat on the workbench, stocking feet scuffing the cement, the old operational stillness on her, except Cara had learned by now that the stillness meant she was about to say something that cost her.

"I'm tired of disappearing," Skye said. “I like teaching yoga.”

Cara waited.

"I've kept a bag packed since I was nineteen years old. The whole point of me is that I can be gone before anyone notices." She looked at her own hands. "I want to unpack the bag. I want to stay, and not because it's the safest move, but because I—" she stopped, and made herself finish it. "Because I'd miss you. All of you. I'd like to stay."

The woman who did not do families had just asked for one. Cara felt it land in the room like weather changing.

"You rented from my uncle," Owen said, into the quiet, "so technically I have standing here." He set the mug down. "And before anybody panics, I'm not asking to move into the basement. I have a department in Los Angeles that already thinks I've been at a very long conference, and a semester that starts in two months, and a life I have to go be a person in." He turned the mug a last time and let it go. "But I just spent days being braver than I have ever been, with people who flew to the Arctic Circle and came across a country into a swamp to get me back. I'm not walking away from that and pretending it was a fieldwork anecdote. Use me. I read things nobody else can read. Call me a consultant, call me your man in the south, call me whatever lets me stay one of yours from a thousand miles off."

They were both looking at Cara. She understood why, and it undid her a little. She was the one who'd done this. She'd washed up in Haven Cove a year ago with a fake name, fake title to a bakery, a locked-down heart and a plan to never need anybody again, and she had accidentally built the one thing she'd spent her whole life running from.

Now the people in it were asking her permission to keep it.

"You don't have to ask," Cara said, when she could. "That's the whole thing about a family. You don't audition. You don't earn your way in, and you can't get voted out." She looked around the ridiculous, sacred basement, at all of them, Wade, Owen, Diane, the cat upstairs running the till, and Gabe. Always Gabe.

He nodded at Skye. Then Owen. "Of course, you’re in. You already were. We were just waiting for you to notice."

Skye’s lips parted. She looked between Cara and Gabe and back again, quickly, as if the picture she saw might instantly change. Then she slid down off the workbench, walked to the corner where she'd dropped her go-bag, set it on the table, and unzipped it, and began, for the first time in her adult life, to unpack.

Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. The family had chosen itself, out loud, on purpose, and the only sound in the room was a zipper and a woman finally putting her things down somewhere she meant to leave them.

Tom came home twelve days later, on his own two feet, because that was the only way he would agree to come home at all.

Just barely. Nomad flew him up from Louisiana with Reagan welded to his side and a wheelchair Tom had abandoned the moment they cleared the tarmac. When the bell over the Sugar & Salt door rang and he eased himself through it, one hand on the frame and the other on Reagan's arm, Cara's first thought was that the swamp had taken a piece out of him it hadn't given back yet. He'd lost twenty pounds he couldn't spare. His skin was the gray of dishwater. He looked, in the kindest possible terms, like death warmed over and served on a slow plate.

Exactly perfect.

Piper was across the bakery before the bell stopped ringing — and then she did the hardest thing Cara had ever watched the kid do, which was stop. Two feet short of her father, arms already up, because she could see what Cara could see: a full-speed Piper would put him flat on the floor.

"Dad." Her voice cracked clean in half on the single syllable.

"Hey, Beautiful." Tom got one arm open. "Come here. Easy, though. I'm held together with about forty staples and a whole lot of thread."

She came in easy and wrapped herself around him careful as glass, her face buried in his shoulder. Tom set his chin down on the top of her head. The same gesture Skye had made, and held his daughter, and closed his eyes.

"You scared me," Piper said into his shirt.

"I know. I'm sorry, kiddo." His hand moved slow on her back. "I'm not going anywhere. I tried it the other way and it didn't take. Turns out I'm very hard to get rid of."

Gabe crossed the room and took Tom's weight off Reagan before anyone asked, got the man's arm up over his shoulders, and walked him to the good chair by the window the way you'd carry something you had very nearly had to bury. Neither of them said a word. But Cara caught the look that passed between them, the man who'd built the plan and the man who'd bled for it, and it said all the things two men like that would go to their graves before saying out loud.

Across the room, Diane pressed the dish towel to her mouth and didn't quite manage to keep her eyes dry. Wade, who had been pretending to reorganize the pastry case for exactly as long as the reunion had been going on, caught her at it. Diane lifted her chin, daring him to say one word about it. Wade didn't. He just held out the corner of his bandana, deadpan, and went back to arranging croissants he had no earthly idea how to arrange, and a look went between the two of them that Cara decided she would be asking about the minute she had room for one more impossible thing.

Agent climbed into Tom's lap the instant he was seated, with the air of a creature reclaiming stolen property, and Tom huffed a laugh that plainly hurt and didn't stop doing it anyway.

Cara stood in her warm kitchen and looked at all of it. Wade, pretending he knew his way around a pastry case. The cat who considered himself the bakery's rightful owner. Tom, held together with thread, and the daughter who would not let go of his hand. The yoga instructor upstairs who'd unpacked her bag. The professor two thousand miles south who'd be calling Thursday.

This was the win. Not Cartwright. Not the network no one would ever get to read about. This room. These people, choosing, over and over, to be in it.