With the tour and our future still lingering in my mind, we enter the kitchen with our fingers linked, the fresh aroma of coffee in the air. I feel like I’m seven years old again and Ella and I are telling my mom how we broke our next-door neighbor Mrs. Millerson’s garden gnome because we wanted to see if it was a real gnome. Mrs. Millerson had caught us and told us we had to get her a new one. We thought we were going to get yelled at but thankfully my mom always went a little easy on me due to the fact that my dad bailed out and she’s always had a soft spot for Ella.

But now instead of telling my mom about the broken gnome we’re telling her that we want to have a wedding in five days and how we almost got married without her. My mom flips out at first, more than I thought she would, but her anger turns to excitement when I remind her that yeah, we were going to get married without her but we decided not to.

Thomas, my mom’s boyfriend who’s a little younger than her, is in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal at the table while all this goes on. He looks a little more cleaned up than when we last saw him, at least he’s wearing a clean T-shirt and jeans without holes in them. My mom is still dressing like she’s younger—her shirt has all this flashy diamond shit on it and there’s some on the trim of her pants. But I don’t say anything about it. I get that she’s happy and even though I still think Thomas is an idiot, especially when he drips milk on the front of his shirt, he seems to make her happy.

“So we’re really going to do this?” my mom asks with a grin on her face as she pours a cup of coffee.

“Do what?” I ask, exchanging a confused glance with Ella, who shrugs, as confused as I am.

My mom shakes her head at me as she sets the coffeepot down on the counter near the sink. “Get married.”

I press back a smirk. “I didn’t realize it was a we thing.”

She sighs, like I’m a silly little child, and walks past us, making her way across the kitchen to the fridge. “I didn’t mean we as in all of us.” She opens the fridge door and takes out a gallon of milk. “I meant we as in you and Ella.” She beams at Ella as she pours milk into her coffee. “The daughter I never had. God, this is going to be so much fun.”

Ella steps back, tensing, shying away because my mom’s enthusiasm is scaring the shit out of her. “What’s going to be so much fun?” she asks.