Wade did not ask me to lay Carter down. Wade felt like Micah laughing upstairs. Like Julian’s lips on mine every morning. Like family dinners and loud cousins and a man who saw me clearly enough to know I could carry myself, and loved me enough to carry things with me anyway.
I was not trading one self for another. I was keeping the good. My strength and my survival. And I was adding the new. My softness and surrender. The family I had chosen and been chosen by.
Carter-Wademeant I could be both.
Strong and soft.
Independent and held.
Capable and covered.
I would always be Carter. But I was Wade now too.
There wasa time in my life whennobody’s coming to save youhad been the truest thing I knew. And I won’t pretend there aren’t seasons when a woman needs that truth. Needs it to get up, wipe her face, feed her child, pay the bills, make the calls, and survive the day.
That truth had saved me more than once. Nobody was coming to live my life for me. Nobody was coming to make me less responsible for myself, or my son, or the woman I still wanted to become.
Butsomebodyhad come to stand inside that life with me.Somebodyhadcome to hold what I could not keep holding alone.Somebodyhad come, not to save me, but to love me through the parts of myself I had built just to survive.
I still feel that old Alyssa sometimes. The one who knew how to survive anything and trust almost nothing. I love her for getting me here. I love her for carrying on while no one carried her. I love her for not giving up when disappearing would have been easier.
But I don’t need to live as her anymore. I can be somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife, somebody’s home, and still belong fully to myself.
So I let Julian hold me. I let his hand spread wide over my back. I let him breathe into my hair and make room for the fear and the joy and the life we’d made out of everything that tried to break us.
For once, I didn’t brace for the fall.
I stood there and let myself be covered by a love I no longer had to earn by being strong enough not to need it.
julian
I broughtit to the table on a Sunday, at Zion and Taryn’s house, with everyone there.
The last time this subject came up, I’d handed down a decision and walked out the door before anybody could protest. I’d made the call alone, deciding I was the only one allowed to carry it.
I wasn’t that man anymore. It had cost me years and nearly cost me Alyssa to stop being him.
“I want to talk to y’all about something,” I said, when dinner was done. “I want to say it, and I want all of you to sit with it, and then I want us to figure it out together. As a family.” I looked around the table. “It’s about Pops.”
Nobody moved. Reggie, sitting across from me, looked at me stunned.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. Especially since… everything that happened.” I didn’t have to lay it out; every one of them knew about the blood and the knife on my kitchen floor and what it had done to us. “I came out the other side of thatreallyunderstanding him, for the first time.” I took a breath and swallowed. “I don’t want him to die alone up there because I was too stubborn to go back a second time.”
Simone started wiping tears from her eyes.
“So here’s what I want to discuss,” I said. “I think it’s time we bring our father home. I’m not telling you that. I’m asking you. All of you. Because he’s not just mine. He’s ours, and this decision is ours. I’m done being the only one who gets a vote at this table.”
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Zion nodded, looking down. “Yeah, Jules. Yeah.”
Uncle Reggie let out a breath I think he’d been holding since the day Pops left. Aunt Lorraine put her hand flat on the table. “It’s time, baby. Past time.”
“Yes. I agree,” Simone said, dabbing her face.
“Let’s do it.” Tre nodded.
“Okay. Then we’re all in agreement,” I said. “I’ll drive up there and?—”
“No you won’t.” Tre cut me off, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, and when I looked at him, his grin was spreading. “Absolutely not you, Jules.” He shook his head. “You’d get up there talking about putting him on a meal plan, restructuring his days, interrogating his nurse, before you say hello. He’d send you back down the hill out of self-preservation.”