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Then: YDHTDAWI.

You don’t have to do anything with it.

I put my phone against my chest. I had told him I was thinking about us, though I couldn’t have said what came next. Seb hadn’t asked me to decide. I wanted, badly enough to ache, to be able to tell him more.

Chapter 16

❧

— Wren —

On Saturday morning, I stood on the porch with Sparrow against my chest, watching for Austen. At ten past eleven, Indira’s car came around the turn, followed by a large SUV I didn’t recognize and Bea’s car. Four bikes rode behind them.

I hadn’t expected them all to come. I kissed the top of Sparrow’s head as the cars pulled up outside the house.

Robin came out and stood next to me.

“Did you know they were all coming?” I asked.

“Austen said she was bringing a few people.” He looked at the line of cars. “She didn’t say how many.”

The four bikes stopped at the bottom of the drive, engines idling. None of the men got off. Dutch was at the front. He looked up at me on the porch and raised his hand.

I raised mine. Dutch nodded and turned his bike around without coming any closer.

Colt did the same. Then Holden. Handful gave me his ridiculous two-finger salute, and I laughed even as my eyes filled with tears.

Then all four of them headed back toward the harbor. I frowned. They rode four hours. They waved. They left. I’d missed them. Even Handful and his stupid salute. I hadn’t let myself think about that for a year.

The car doors opened. I braced for all of them to come up the drive at once, children and bags and hellos. Instead, the others hung back with the little ones while Indira came to me. I wondered if they’d planned to give me a moment with each of them.

She had Rohan in a baby sling against her chest and Maya beside her. Maya had been two and a half and mostly furious when I left. Now she was three and a half and had the same stubborn set to her mouth as her dad. Indira’s eyes filled before she reached the porch. I wanted to go to her, but I couldn’t make my legs move. She closed the distance herself and wrapped her free arm around Sparrow and me.

“You had her,” she whispered. “You really had her.”

“And you had him.” I touched the edge of Rohan’s sling. I’d pictured Indira pregnant so many times while I was carrying Sparrow. Here was the little boy I’d never met, asleep against her chest.

Then Lilac, with her daughter Poppy on her hip and four boys getting out of the SUV behind her. Luca and Knox were enormous now, eleven years old and all arms and legs. Graham and Danny ran straight for the yard. Lilac kissed my cheek, then Sparrow’s hair. Poppy stared at Sparrow, reached for her sleeve, and Sparrow waved a fist back at her.

“Look at them,” Lilac said. She smiled at the girls, but her eyes were wet when she looked up at me. I leaned in and hugged her again, careful of both babies.

Betty got out of the SUV and smiled at me. “I’ll keep the Spencer hellions busy,” she told Lilac, then went after the boys.

Bea came over from her car with Curtis asleep in a sling, oblivious to the reunion going on around him. She put a hand against my cheek. I hadn’t been there when her son was born either, and she hadn’t been there when my daughter came into the world. Her eyes filled and I cried again.

And Austen.

Austen didn’t get out for a second. I saw her sitting in the passenger seat of Bea’s car through the windshield, not moving, with Wilder in the back. Then she got out, opened the back door and lifted him from his car seat. She shut the door and stood there with him against her shoulder, looking at me.

“Right,” she said. “I’m going to say this once and then we’re done with it.”

Everybody carried on unloading around us. Indira talked to Robin about something and Lilac shouted at Danny about the mud. Nobody looked at us, and I had never been more grateful to a group of women in my life.

“You cut us off,” Austen said.

I nodded.

“A whole year. Not one word. I sent message after message and you never answered.” Her voice shook. “I didn’t even know if you were alive, Wren. None of us did.”