Things we Left behind

My breath left me in a silver cloud.

Grief had a way of infiltrating everything, even when you were prepared for it.

“When you have everything to lose, you’ll do anything to keep it,” I said darkly.

You’ve been warned by my woman

I stopped circling my arm and peered around the side of my house, beyond the dingy beige siding, past the patches of weeds to the fence that divided good from bad in my life.

And there she was in the window beyond the cherry tree. The good

“I don’t love to hate you.”

“How’s my little one?” Waylay asked, cooing at her daughter nestled in my arms.

In a twist of fate, Caden and Waylay had officially joined
our families by overcoming years of friendship and falling in love in college.

Our oldest son, Caden was twenty-­five. We’d finalized his and his sister Caitlin’s adoption from foster care when Sloane was pregnant with our first baby, a boy we named Simon. In the course of four months, we’d gone from zero children to three. And we’d added a fourth, Juliana, just one year later.

Nolan cried and wrapped Lucian in a bear hug. Nolan’s wife documented the hug with her camera, and Petula framed it for the office.

Sloane and Lucian danced their first dance as man and wife to Shania Twain’s “From This Moment On.”