Page 164 of Safe With You

The house was quiet when I made it downstairs.

Not completely. The dishwasher hummed in the kitchen, and the television was still playing whatever I’d left on before taking Mila upstairs, the volume low enough that I couldn’t make out what anybody was saying.

I picked up the remote and turned it off.

That made it worse.

I looked around the living room.

Uno cards were still scattered across the coffee table from last night. Mila’s shoes sat in the middle of the floor even though I’d told her twice to put them by the door, and one of her hair ties had somehow ended up on the arm of the couch.

Normal.

All of it.

I bent down and started gathering the cards.

For the record, I hadn’t cheated.

Mila had apparently decided otherwise, and Luna hadn’t needed much convincing to take her side.

A smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it.

I stacked the cards and set them back inside the box.

I don’t mind.

That had been her answer when I’d told Mila she might want a day off from us.

I hadn’t expected it.

Maybe because I’d been halfway joking when I said it. We’d been at the bookstore for hours by then, long enough for Mila to make herself at home and for me to somehow end up helping Luna close a business I had absolutely no ownership in.

I’d stayed anyway.

Long after there’d been any real reason to.

I sat back against the couch.

There had been a time when days like that would’ve belonged to three people.

The thought came quietly.

So did Elena.

It wasn’t unusual anymore.

Three years hadn’t made me forget the way she could fill a room without trying. Or how she’d sit cross-legged on the living room floor with Mila when she was barely old enough to hold a book the right way, turning pages while Mila slapped both hands against the pictures.

Elena had been convinced she was raising a reader.

I used to tell her Mila was chewing on more books than she was reading.

She’d told me that wasn’t the point.

I smiled at the memory.

It still hurt.