“Then why did it take you guys so long to actually be together?”

Damian crossed the room and rested a hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“Because some people,” he said, “have to get completely lost before they figure out what was worth finding all along.”

Lily looked distinctly unconvinced by this.

“Well,” she said, “you guys took way too long.”

And all three of them burst out laughing, warm and unburdened, in the bright kitchen of a house that did not leak, and there was nothing behind the laughter anymore, no shadow, no debt, no cold — only the sound of a family that had, against every odd, arrived.