I scowl at her. “I’m not old.”
“Late thirties counts as old.”
“When are you moving out again?” I mumble as Otter rubs my back.
“August,” she says happily. “And don’t even try that with me. Otter already told me you’re sad about it.”
“Traitor,” I hiss at him.
He rolls his eyes. “Like it’s a secret. You hugged her at her graduation for almost twenty minutes and told her that she didn’t have to go if she didn’t want to, that she could stay in the Green Monstrosity forever.”
“I was being courteous.”
“I’ve never had a grown man cry on my shoulder for that length of time before,” Izzie says. “My friends asked me if you had a medical condition.”
“Papa cries at everything,” Lily says.
“I do not!”
“You cried when Noah used the potty for the first time,” Otter reminds me.
“I pee so good,” Noah announces to everyone in the room.
“I want a new family,” I say, and Lily and Noah immediately protest loudly, telling me I’m not allowed that at all.
Izzie’s looking amused, Otter’s smiling at me like I’m the best thing to have happened to him, and our kids are hanging on my legs, telling me that they’re my family, and I can’t get a new one, and there’s this burst of light in my chest, warm and bright, and yes, we’ve had shit thrown at us. We’ve been knocked down. We’ve been hurt.
But we’ve made it. Here. Now.
To this day of all days.
I would do it all over again to get to this moment.
WE PULL up to that little section of beach that only we seem to know about. Except today, the parking lot is full, more cars here than I’ve ever seen before. There’s only a couple of spaces left, and I don’t know why I’m so surprised. Ty had said the guest list was a little bigger than he’d been expecting, looking surprised at the thought that there were so many people that he’d wanted to invite. People from his master’s program, colleagues, friends from outside of school, half the force, where Dom now works as a detective. Our family, of course, all of us that had made it to this point. A couple of years ago, we’d had a scare with Jerry—Creed and Otter’s father—when he’d had a heart attack, but he’d made it through and bemoaned the fact that Alice was never going to allow him to eat anything delicious ever again. Much to the surprise of everyone, he was now a vegetarian, Tyson somehow infecting him with his evil, and he was doing better than he had in years.
The twins are chattering excitedly as Izzie tries to unbuckle them from their booster seats, their little arms flailing as they laugh and squeal and all around make life difficult. Otter and I both turn to look at them, wearing what Izzie calls our dad faces (“They’re hysterical”), eyebrows arched, mouths thinned.
The twins quiet immediately, watching both of us and waiting.
We have trained them so well.
“What are the rules for today?” Otter asks.
Lily groans as her brother grins goofily at her. “Do we have to do this now?”
“Yes,” I tell her.
“Fine. No going in the water.”
“No putting sands in our pockets to take home to have a beach at our house,” Noah adds gleefully.
“No trying to catch a seagull to study,” Lily says with a frown, like her dads are the most unfair people in the world.
“No telling people I don’t pick my nose and eat it anymore,” Noah says, clapping his hands.
“The fact that he says that means we’re good parents,” I tell Otter.
Before I can say anything else, there’s a frantic pounding on the passenger window, causing all of us to jump. We all turn and it’s—