Page 200 of The Final Cut

“What? I’m respecting the emotional moment.”

“You are being a dick.”

Shiloh presses his lips together, but his eyes are warm when they move to me.

I look at Homer. The cat has given up on murder and is now batting at a fallen olive with both paws.

“One of her kittens?” I ask.

Deacon’s gaze returns to mine. “Was a female. I kept her too.”

My chest hurts. “Deacon.”

“I didn’t spay her.”

Sonny lowers her sunglasses slowly. “This is the weirdest family planning conversation I’ve ever witnessed.”

No one laughs. Not really.

Deacon’s attention stays on me. “I wanted you to have one.”

The words are so simple they do more damage than poetry would have.

Fifteen years. He kept a cat. Then her kitten.

Then another generation, maybe more, all because somewhere inside the blood and letters and impossible choices, he’d decided a girl who lost everything should someday have something living from before.

Something warm. Something hers.

Homer bats the olive under Delia’s chair, then headbutts her ankle.

Delia makes a sound that isn’t quite a sob. I reach for her without thinking. She reaches back.

Our hands meet on the tabletop, fingers locking hard enough to hurt. She stares at Homer like grief has finally found the stupidest, softest door and kicked it open.

“He’s family,” she whispers.

That breaks me.

My laugh comes out wet and awful. “He’s also an idiot.”

“He gets that from your side,” Delia says, and then she starts crying harder.

I do too.

Sonny takes one look at both of us, reaches across me, and snatches up a napkin. “I leave you alone for five minutes, and you acquire a dead sister, secret mother, a cartel, and a legacy cat.”

“It was a little longer than five minutes.”

“I’ve learned my lesson.”

Marisol reaches for Delia’s other hand.

The three of us sit there in the morning sun, crying at a terrace table in Isabel’s former house over a cat descended from a cat with the wrong name. Sonny dabs at her own eyes while claiming allergies. Homer finally notices the emotional weight of his lineage, sneezes, and tries to eat the olive.

Ever crosses the terrace and removes it from his reach.

“No.”