Chapter 13 - New Year's Eve
Michael waited until New Year's Eve, as Claire had asked, though the intervening week had tested every ounce of patience he possessed. He spent the days productively enough — helping Emma with a school project on family trees that had taken on unexpected new complexity given recent events, taking Jack sledding at the hill behind the elementary school, having two long, honest conversations with Sophia about what came next for both of them as newly reconfigured almost-family.
"You should tell her tonight," Sophia advised him, over coffee on the thirtieth, in the easy, clear-eyed way she'd adopted since the engagement ended, as though releasing the weight of that particular hope had freed her to think clearly about everyone else's. "Don't wait for some perfect moment. There isn't one. There's just the moment you're brave enough to take."
"What if she says no?"
"Then she says no, and you respect that, and you keep being a good father and a decent person, and maybe someday the answer changes. But Michael—" Sophia set down her mug, fixing him with the direct, searching look that had, in another timeline, nearly made her his wife, "—I don't think she's going to say no. I've seen the way she looks at you. I saw it at the pageant, before any of us knew what was coming. Whatever else changed this month, that hasn't."
So on New Year's Eve, after the children had been deposited at Claire's sister-in-law's house for a supervised sleepover with their cousins — arranged weeks earlier, entirely by coincidence, in a stroke of timing that felt, to Michael, almost providential — he drove to Larkspur Lane with a bottle of sparkling cider (not wine; he wanted this to be a conversation Claire could remember with total clarity) and knocked on the door at eight o'clock, snow falling lightly, the porch swing swaying gently in the breeze.
Claire opened the door in a soft green sweater, hair loose around her shoulders, and something in her face told Michael she had been expecting him, had perhaps been watching the clock all evening with the same nervous anticipation he'd carried all day.
"You're right on time," she said.
"I promised you January," Michael said. "I figured close enough counts."
They sat together on the porch swing, cider poured into two mismatched mugs from Claire's kitchen, watching the snow fall over the quiet street, neighbors' houses glowing warm through curtained windows, someone down the block already setting off small fireworks in premature celebration.
"I've had a lot of time to think," Claire said, before Michael could speak. "About everything. About Mom, and Sophia, and what family actually means when you strip away all the assumptions you grew up with. And I keep coming back to something Emma said to you, apparently, the night of the pageant — don't waste time being scared."
"She said something similar to me," Michael admitted.
"She's smarter than both of us combined," Claire said, with a small laugh. "But she's right, Michael. I spent three years being scared — scared of trusting you again, scared of admitting I'd never fully stopped loving you, scared of what it would mean for the kids if we tried again and it fell apart a second time, in front of them, after they'd finally adjusted to the world as it was. I built a very safe, very lonely life out of that fear."
"And now?" Michael asked, hardly daring to hope.
Claire turned to face him fully, snow catching in her hair, the porch light casting everything in soft gold. "Now I think I'm done being scared. Not because I know for certain this will work — I don't, and neither do you, and anyone who tells you they know for certain is lying. But because I'd rather try this, honestly, with everything I know now that I didn't know three years ago, than spend another decade performing peace I don't actually feel."
May you like
"Is that a yes?" Michael asked, echoing, almost exactly, the question Claire had asked Sophia weeks earlier over the phone.
"That's a yes," Claire said, and when Michael leaned in to kiss her, slow and careful, as though relearning something precious he'd once taken for granted, the fireworks down the street finally caught properly, bursting gold and red over the snow-covered rooftops of Larkspur Lane, right on the stroke of midnight, ringing in a year neither of them had expected, and both of them, finally, wanted.
