I passed my hand across the top of my head. “Two things I didn’t anticipate happening when I came home for a visit. Getting romantically involved with a friend and not a sexy stranger.” I bit my bottom lip. “And feeling like all that stuff with Mom happened yesterday and not years ago. I thought I’d locked it all away.”

I’d never been more tempted to blurt out every last remaining secret that I had. The only thing holding me back was fear—fear that when my family found out I’d known about my mom’s affair all along, had gone along with her lies, they’d stop trusting me too. Some part of me knew that emotionally keeping myself at arm’s length was why I felt like an outsider in my own family, even as they so clearly loved the hell out of me. But they weren’t the problem. I was.

At least now as I traveled across the country, far from them for long periods of time, I could feel their love—in their calls and text messages and emails. Their silly care packages and cat videos. I’d made the decision to cut my mother out of my life when I was an adult. She’d, however, up and left me when I was just a kid. My darkest, middle-of-the-night worry was that I’d unburden myself of secrets only to find all that unconditional love changed to conditional.

“I feel that way too, and I live here,” Alexis said. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel close or that it matters. Other days, it’s like you and I are teens again, watching Mom and Dad fight. It’s not something I can control.” She smiled. “The only silver lining to all of this is that when Eric and I got married, we saw it as an opportunity to love each other and parent the way we wanted. And we love Juliet so much. We support and lift her up no matter what she wants to do. And we both work with kids every day and encourage their imagination. Their creativity, their wishes. And we don’t care about their mistakes.”

“The opposite of how Mom raised us,” I said grimly.

“Exactly.”

I pulled my knees into my chest and gazed at two of my most favorite people in the whole world. “Your story is the real deal. It’s a happily ever after.”

Alexis cocked her head. “Yours is too. Whether it was a story you’d written or one you’d shot on that old camera we had, Mom went out of her way to ignore it or pass judgment on it. And now look at you. All of your stories are about love.”

I hummed a little, considered that description. “I always describe them as being about the power of a community, coming together.”

“Isn’t that love too?” she said.

Juliet called down for her parents, who both rose off the couch and made their way to the stairs.