Caleb’s POV
Peace is louder than I expected.
Not in the way war is loud—all sirens and slamming doors and my mother's muffled sobs through drywall. This is the opposite kind. The hum of a house where people actually want to be, where no one flinches when a cabinet shuts too hard, where breakfast doesn't feel like a hostage negotiation.
It's July. The kitchen windows are open, and the morning air carries cut grass and coffee and the faint sweetness of Catherine's garden roses.
William sits at the head of the table with the newspaper spread in front of him, reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, and he looks up when I come downstairs.
"You see this?" He taps an article with his index finger. "New environmental bill just passed the committee. They're actually pushing carbon caps on manufacturing."
"About a decade late, but sure." I pull out the chair across from him and reach for the orange juice. "Who sponsored it?"
"Hargrove, believe it or not. The same senator who blocked the last three."
"Election year does wonders for a man's conscience."
William laughs—a real one, the kind that creases the skin around his eyes and makes his whole face warm. Six months ago, he could barely look at me across this table.
Now he argues policy with me before nine AM like it's the most natural thing in the world.
This is what fathers do, I think, and the realization doesn't sting the way it used to. It just settles, quiet and sure, into a space that Simon carved out and left hollow.
Catherine comes in from the garden with a handful of basil, soil still dark under her fingernails. She sets it on the counter, wipes her hands on her apron, and starts assembling plates with the practiced efficiency of a woman who's been feeding people her whole life.
"Serena, bunny, can you hand me the—"
She stops. Her hand freezes midair over the cutting board, and a flush crawls up her neck.
"I'm sorry." Catherine's voice is careful, almost brittle. "I didn't mean to—that just slipped out."
Serena stands in the doorway behind me. I don't turn around, but I feel her there the way I always do—a shift in gravity, the room recalibrating when she enters it.
"It's okay." Serena's voice is soft, but there's no tremor in it. No rehearsed forgiveness, no tight-lipped tolerance. She moves to the counter and pulls a bowl from the cabinet, handing it to Catherine with a small smile. "Really, Catherine. It's okay."
Catherine blinks, her eyes going glassy for half a second before she recovers. She takes the bowl and nods, pressing her lips together like she's holding back words that would come out too raw for a Tuesday morning.
William catches my eye over his newspaper. Neither of us says anything. Neither of us needs to.
After breakfast, Serena curls up in the window seat in the living room with her laptop balanced on her knees. She's been writing for weeks now—not the meticulous legal briefs and case analyses she used to produce like clockwork, but real writing.
The kind that comes from a place she doesn't guard with barbed wire anymore.
"What's the word count?" I lean against the doorframe, coffee in hand.
"Don't ask me that." She doesn't look up, her fingers still moving across the keyboard. "You sound like a professor."
"I sound like someone who watched you stare at paragraph three for forty minutes yesterday."
"That paragraph earned those forty minutes." She finally lifts her gaze, and the sunlight catches her hair, turning it the color of warm honey.
"It's about Mom. The early days, before the diagnosis. How she used to describe love like it was a place you could walk into instead of a feeling you had to earn."
My chest tightens. "That sounds like her."
"You barely knew her."
"I knew what she left behind." I hold her stare. "That's enough."
The afternoon passes in the kind of unhurried quiet that used to make me restless. I spend two hours on internship applications at the kitchen table—corporate law firms, environmental policy groups, a civil rights nonprofit William mentioned last week that's looking for summer associates.
My GPA survived the semester by sheer stubbornness and the fact that Serena quizzed me on torts until I could recite case law in my sleep.
By six o'clock, Catherine is in full hosting mode. The tiramisu has been chilling since yesterday, the dining table is set for six, and she's changed her blouse twice.
"You'd think the Pope was coming," I tell her, stealing a spoon of mascarpone from the counter.
"Rachel is important to you." Catherine swats my hand away. "That makes her important to this family. Now stop eating the filling before I have to make another batch."
Rachel arrives at six-thirty with a bottle of wine and the same quiet composure she's carried since the trial ended. She shakes William's hand, hugs Catherine with genuine warmth, and when she sees me, her smile is uncomplicated in a way that took us a long time to earn.
"Nice place," she says, glancing around the dining room. "Very grown-up."
"Don't let the crown molding fool you. There's a lacrosse stick in the umbrella stand."
Mia shows up ten minutes later with two kinds of bread and a complete inability to stop talking about her new internship at the advocacy center.
She launches into a story about a filing mishap that somehow involves a stapler, a fire alarm, and her supervisor's emotional support iguana, and Catherine laughs so hard she has to set down the serving dish.
Dinner is warm in the way I didn't know dinners could be. Not performed warmth, not the careful choreography of people trying not to detonate the mines between them. Just food and conversation and Mia's fork scraping the tiramisu dish for a third helping while Catherine beams.
"I'm not even sorry," Mia announces, licking mascarpone off her thumb. "This is a religious experience."
"There's more in the fridge," Catherine offers.
"Don't enable her," Serena says, but she's smiling.
"You're all witnesses," Mia points her fork around the table. "If I have a mascarpone-related emergency tonight, it's Catherine's fault."
"I accept full responsibility," Catherine says, and Rachel covers her mouth to hide her laughter.
Across the table, Serena reaches for her water glass, and her eyes meet mine over the rim. She doesn't hold the look for long—just a beat, maybe two. But in that brief pause, I feel the full weight of everything we survived to get here.
Not the desperate, electric pull that used to drag us together in darkened hallways. Not the ache of wanting what we couldn't have. Just the steady, certain warmth of two people who walked through fire and chose to keep walking toward each other.
I hold her gaze, and she holds mine, and the whole table keeps talking around us like the world didn't just go perfectly, impossibly still.
After dinner, I help Catherine clear the dishes while Serena walks Rachel and Mia to their cars. The kitchen is quiet, warm from the oven, and Catherine hums under her breath as she rinses plates.
"Tonight was nice," she says, handing me a plate to dry. "I like seeing you with your people."
"My people." I turn the phrase over, letting it settle. "Yeah. I guess they are."
"They are." She glances at me, then back at the sink. "All of them."
She doesn't say Serena's name. She doesn't need to.
When Serena comes back inside, she's carrying a jacket draped over her arm. Worn leather, cracked and faded, carrying the ghost of every race I ever rode.
My racing jacket. The one I left with Shane months ago.
"This was on the porch," Serena says, holding it up. "There's a package slip tucked under the collar. Shane's address." She turns it over in her hands, studying the familiar scuffs and scratches. "Did you ask him to send it back?"
"No." I set down the dish towel. "I told him to keep it."
Serena frowns, her fingers already drifting toward the inside pocket—the one I always kept zipped, the one that held the only thing I ever carried into a race besides fear.
"There's something in here," she says, and her hand disappears into the lining.