Gavin took the first bite of his dinner and hummed in appreciation. It was perfect.
“Thank you,” he said, tearing off a chunk of roll and running it through a warm pool of gravy. “It’s delicious. I didn’t realize I was so hungry. Thanks for thinking of me.”
Lamp flickered in acknowledgment before brightening again.
Gavin let the feeling of contentment and hope wash over him. No one gets to pick the family they’re given, and as far as families go—and despite what Delilah thought—he actually considered himself pretty lucky. House might be nosy and overprotective, but it was his and he loved it. You don’t divorce your parents because they love you too much. You don’t get a new brother or sister because you don’t like the ones you have.
Somehow, he would make it work. House just needed to see how wonderful Delilah was; that was all. His love was big enough to share. He’d just have to figure out a way to show them both.
Chapter Eighteen
Her
Delilah fought sleep that night. Exhaustion weighed down the edges of her mind, making her thoughts syrupy and dense, but until her phone buzzed beneath her pillow to let her know Gavin was safe at home, she didn’t want to close her eyes.
Instead, she climbed back out of bed at one in the morning and went to sit at her desk. Perched on the never-used surface was a shiny silver frame displaying a picture of Delilah with her parents, taken the summer before. It had been her shortest visit back from Massachusetts yet, but even though she’d been home for only a week, her father hadn’t even taken a day off work to spend time with her. The picture was taken on a weekend, at a nearby park, where Delilah’s mother had tried to put together a cheerful picnic of sandwiches and apples. Much of the picnic was decimated by ants, and her father left after only an hour, claiming he was needed at the office.
She pulled the photograph from the frame, staring at her father’s doughy face. In the way that words start to feel misspelled when one stares at them too long, his face started to look unfamiliar the longer she looked at him. Pulling a black marker from her bag, she began drawing thick brows over his pale ones, a black, angry frown over his indifferent mouth. In only a few minutes, her father had become a glowering gargoyle.
Delilah left her mother’s plain, constantly surprised expression alone but drew blue lips over her own mouth, twisted black horns on her head, and crooked orange butterfly lashes over her eyes and reaching almost to her hairline as she thought back on the strange visit home.
“Don’t they want to see more of me?” she’d asked Nonna when she’d returned to the silent stillness of a boarding-school town in the middle of summer.
“Do you want to see more of them?” Nonna had asked in reply. It was one of her more fluent moments, when her eyes cleared and she knew everything she’d always known, wasn’t lost to a vague panic or searching for something she’d misplaced.
Delilah had grown quiet and unsure. She didn’t know that she wanted more time with her parents, only that she’d hoped to feel more wanted whenever she went home.
“Baby, if I’ve learned one thing in the past sixteen years, it’s this: When it comes to your parents, we both need to lower our expectations. Don’t poke at anything you don’t want to face.” Nonna had left the room then, returning a few minutes later with a kiss to the top of Delilah’s head and a giant platter of cookies in her arms.
Two weeks later, Nonna didn’t even remember that conversation. If the Nonna of last summer knew that Delilah would be brought home just after Christmas that year—that she would be back living with her parents and finishing out high school in her hometown—she would have raised hell.