While Dean was growing programs, I was busy rooting my business in Philadelphia, making contacts and focusing on stories about activism. The land bank had hired me almost right away. And working on Annie’s pocket park had inspired me so much I started studying other urban green spaces in the city and the neighborhoods that had fought to build them. I had enough footage that I was toying with the idea of making a documentary. Although it was currently on the back burner for my newest project: making a movie to celebrate forty years of the Lavender Center helping people like me and Dean.

I hitched my thumb over my shoulder. “You’re not nervous to lose to me, are you?”

He dropped down into a runner’s lunge. “Win or lose, I still get nervous around you, Tabitha.”

I mimicked him, fingers grazing the ground. “You did this last time, you know. Flirted with me until I was distracted.”

He seemed to ponder that statement. But then he whispered, “Go” and went sprinting up the steps.

I briefly enjoyed the sight of Dean running and flirting with me on a warm night. Then I followed behind him, racing up the steps shoulder to shoulder, out of breath and trying not to laugh.

I’d spent my first six months back home living with Alexis and Eric and getting to be a full-time aunt to Juliet. It gave my family and me even more time to connect with each other without the burdensome weight of secrets or guilt. My sister and I had more conversations about our childhood, about the things in our past that still impacted our present. We were slowly but surely untangling the worst of it.

I spent every Tuesday night keeping my dad company at the diner, and every Saturday morning we rotated who cooked a big, Tyler family breakfast. The first time Dean cooked for all of us—wearing an apron and everything—I was teased mercilessly for my inability to stop staring at him. But I couldn’t be blamed for the way Dean looked in the kitchen—forearms flexing as he flipped pancakes, a streak of powdered sugar on his cheek, the look of adorable apprehension as he waited to see if my dad liked the food.

He’d loved it, of course. Drew Tyler hadn’t stopped being a fan just because Dean stopped boxing.