Alicia took over the chopping while Marcus stirred the pot on the stove, and Nathan stood there watching them move around each other with practiced ease, and felt that by now familiar ache of wanting to belong to this, to be part of their rhythm instead of just a visitor passing through. “What?” Alicia asked, catching him staring. “Nothing. Just this is nice.”
Marcus glanced over from the stove. “What is?” “This. Cooking together. Being here.” Nathan hesitated, then said what he’d been thinking for weeks. “I never had this growing up. Family dinners, people teaching me things, that feeling of being—” He trailed off, not sure how to finish. “Home?” Marcus supplied quietly. “Yeah, home.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Marcus turned off the stove and came over to where Nathan was standing. He looked Nathan in the eye, serious now. “You are home, son. You know that, right? This isn’t you visiting. This is you being part of our family.” Nathan’s throat tightened. “Marcus—” “I mean it. You saved my life just as much as I saved yours. Maybe more. This farm, this life, my daughter getting to go to college, none of that happens without you. So stop thinking of yourself as a guest. You’re family.”
“You’re family,” Alicia echoed, and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “That’s what you are, whether you believe it or not.” Nathan couldn’t speak. He just nodded, blinking hard, and went back to very badly cutting vegetables while Marcus and Alicia pretended not to notice he was crying.
That evening, after dinner was eaten and the dishes were washed, the three of them sat on the porch watching fireflies drift across the darkening field. Nathan was in the middle, Alicia on his left, and Marcus on his right, and there was something perfect about the symmetry of it, about being flanked by the two people who’d somehow become his family.
“Can I ask you something?” Alicia said into the comfortable silence. “Sure.” “Why don’t you ever talk about your family? Your real family, I mean. Your parents.” Nathan had known this question would come eventually. Alicia was too smart and too curious not to notice the gaps in his stories. He’d been preparing an answer for weeks, something vague and deflecting, but sitting here on this porch with these people who’d seen him at his worst and chosen to keep him anyway, he found he didn’t want to lie.
“There’s not much to talk about,” he said finally. “My parents’ marriage was bad from the start. I don’t have many memories of them being happy together. Mostly I remember them fighting, my dad cheating, my mom crying or yelling or both. When I was ten, they divorced, and dad moved to California, started over, got remarried, had more kids, the whole thing.”