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Chapter Text

It didn’t happen often, but Charlie had lost the Stardew Valley Fair grange competition once or twice over the years.

There had been that memorable time when Marnie had produced a wheel of cheese the size of a car tire, taking three people to hoist it into her display box. Another, close to a decade later and just before Willy’s retirement, when the old fisherman had caught a fish referred to by local anglers as just “the Legend.” Even Pierre had gotten in on the action twice, the two years after he’d taken a floral arranging class online and stepped up his bouquet game. Charlie was competitive, but he wasn’t a sore loser; his neighbors were always gracious and kind when he won, so he returned the favor. (Even if he pouted about it a little to Harvey in the privacy of their own home.)

So, no, it wasn’t the first time the villagers had seen Charlie lose the grange competition. But the latest loss was remarkable for a different reason. Because this year, Charlie stood up among his neighbors and waited with his heart in his throat. He tapped his foot impatiently, making agonized eye contact with Harvey in the crowd as Lewis rambled to the crowd about the variety of talent found within Pelican Town’s borders. And then, when the announcement was finally made, the top prize was awarded not to Charlie, but to an equally nervous-looking teenage girl. At which Charlie punched both fists into the air, shouting so loudly it startled birds out of the trees, “YES!”

The year Charlie was so happy to lose was his twenty-seventh in the village, and a few things had happened in the intervening decades. When Charlie had first moved to town, the Fair had been a quaint, modest event, befitting the quaint, modest town that hosted it. A farming competition, a handful of carnival games, a petting zoo, a fortune teller; it had attracted a handful of tourists each year, but hardly drawn a crowd.

But as Pelican Town had changed over the years, so had the Fair. The first changes had been small. When Gus had scrounged together enough money to build a patio outside the Stardrop’s doors, a beer garden had sprung up on it during the Fair. (Word spread quickly about this, because a certain farm debuted its newest wines there each year.) A few years after that, the abandoned house in Cindersap Forest had been purchased and painstakingly renovated. Its bottom floor was home to the Valley’s first veterinary clinic, and a spacious outbuilding—set far enough back in the trees to muffle the noise—held the workshop of an up-and-coming inventor. The year after the first Robot Royale battle was held at the Fair, attendance had doubled.  

The school had been a surprise to everyone. As the number of children in Pelican Town had grown, concerned parents had met to discuss possibilities. They could hire more teachers, but without a building, where would they teach? Unexpectedly, a prodigal son had returned to the Valley with a solution. After moving to Zuzu City with Sam and Abigail, Sebastian had finally released his first game—built and distributed totally independently. The runaway success of the title had made him fabulously wealthy, beyond the wildest dreams of anyone in Pelican Town. But five years into city life, he had realized that perhaps the Valley wasn’t the prison he had always believed it to be. He had returned home, bringing along Abigail (to her mother’s great relief) and leaving Sam to pursue his music career (to his mother’s great dismay). Older, wiser, and looking for a way to repay the community that had welcomed him back with open arms, he had been only too happy to donate a tiny fraction of his fortune to establish a real school in Pelican Town at last.

Of course, a new school had brought new teachers, which meant new families moving to town. Penny had, with the support of her students’ families, gone back to school herself—taking classes from Ferngill University online, she had earned a master’s degree and been unanimously appointed principal by the newly-formed school board. She had set about hiring three teachers: Joyce, an older woman, who she hired for her endless patience; Alex, who had finally given up on his professional sports dreams, but who turned out to make an excellent PE teacher; and a shy young man, James, who she hired mostly for his enthusiasm about English, but (if she was honest with herself) also for his dark eyes and wide smiles. Penny and James’s own children attended the school when they were old enough, and both parents did their best to avoid favoritism in the classroom. (It mostly worked.)

This wasn’t the only educational opportunity in Pelican Town. After years of successful art shows and several published novels, Leah and Elliott had established an artists’ residency program. A series of talented young creators shuffled through the beach shack, which had been left vacant once Elliott had moved in with Leah. Once a year, a whole flock of aspiring artists descended on Pelican Town for a week-long retreat, and their resulting work was displayed at the Fair. The boost to the town’s economy had been enough even to satisfy Lewis.

Other changes had naturally followed. When Marlon and Gil had finally hung up their swords, Abigail had bought the Adventurers’ Guild from them. She never had lost her lust for danger, although she had lost her fear of bats, thankfully. Shane’s veterinary clinic needed a nurse, which had brought Barbara to town—a boisterous, friendly widow with a laugh as big as her hair. She had met Gus on her second day in town, asked him out on her fifth, moved in with him on her sixtieth, and married him a year to the day after moving in. No one had so much as batted an eye at the whirlwind romance; it was impossible to imagine two people better suited for each other. And since Barbara’s big laugh and big hair were also part of a big family, Gus had become a stepfather to her five adult children—and a few short years later, he’d become Grandpa Gus.

One of Barbara’s daughters had moved to Pelican Town to be closer to the grandparents, and she and her wife had opened a bakery in the Square. Joyce’s niece had fallen in love with the town, moving into Harvey’s old apartment above the clinic and opening a yoga studio in Pierre and Caroline’s back room. (Harvey had attended classes several times a week for years now, no longer embarrassed to be taking care of himself.) The Community Center, which Charlie had worked hard to help renovate, now bustled with activity every night of the week. Someone was always teaching a class, or holding a recital, or just bringing food to share with their neighbors. Charlie had always loved Pelican Town, just as it was, but there was no denying it was much more vibrant than it had once been. It had walked the seemingly impossible line of growing and changing without losing its heart. He was so, so proud of how far it had come.

Not every change had been easy. He missed Evelyn and George all the time, and frequently stopped by the cemetery to leave flowers (or the occasional cookie). Willy and Linus, too; he still couldn’t thread bait onto a fishhook without feeling a little pang. Emily had left town only a year after Simon was born, moving to the Calico Desert after proposing to Sandy. (Charlie and Harvey saw them just as often, though; the Wizard’s obelisk had never stopped working.) Sam never had returned to town, staying in the city and developing a small but devoted following around his music. He’d become a father—taking full-time custody of his son, Nathan, after the breakup of his relationship—and once Vincent had gone off to college, Kent and Jodi had moved to the city to be closer to their grandson. Haley had moved overseas to pursue a career as a fashion photographer; Clint had met a woman online and moved to Zuzu City, where he earned a shockingly good living making artisanal knives for local chefs. Jas had become a doctor, true to her word, and had stayed in the city afterward—though she at least came back frequently to visit Uncle Shane and Aunt Marnie, bringing her husband and kids with her. (They also visited Aunt Marnie’s husband, Richard, an absurdly hot and muscular ranch hand fifteen years her junior who she’d originally hired to replace Shane—and who had fallen head over heels in love with her. Charlie suspected Lewis was still sour about it, but he’d had his chance.) 

All of these people—Charlie’s neighbors both old and new, their extended families, their network of friends—descended on the Fair every year, along with an increasing stream of tourists. But one day hardly seemed enough time to play games, watch the grange competition, visit the beer garden and the petting zoo, sample all the food, view the art display, and listen to all the music played on the stage Gus and Barbara had built, and so it had expanded to become a weekend-long event around a decade prior. Though it held the least appeal for tourists, the grange competition was still the highlight for the locals. It was a throwback to the older, sleepier days of Pelican Town’s history, a tradition that was just for them. And on the day he lost to the beaming, thrilled-looking teenage girl, Charlie had more than one reason to celebrate.

* * * * *

EARLIER THAT DAY

“Farm boy, you have got to stop the fucking bouncing. You’re giving me a headache.”

“He’s just excited. I think it’s sweet.”

“Thank you, Maru. I haven’t seen him in six months!”

“We know. You never shut up about it. He’s a grown man, you have to—”

“There it is!” Charlie grabbed both Maru and Shane by the arms, holding tight to keep himself from running to the train before it had even stopped moving. Maru covered his hand with hers; Shane gave an aggrieved sigh, but didn’t pull away. Charlie knew he was almost as excited, just hiding it better. As the train doors opened, Charlie’s bouncing intensified to a degree that annoyed even himself. Any moment, he would be stepping onto the platform. Any moment, Charlie would get to see—

“Simon!” he shouted, catching sight of a familiar tall, gangly figure. He broke away from Maru and Shane, crossing the platform in record time. As he reached his son, Simon grinned at him, rolling his eyes good-naturedly and allowing Charlie to fling his arms around him. Simon’s hugs always brought a bit of a lump to Charlie’s throat; he remembered when they couldn’t reach above his knees, and now Simon had to lean down to put his arms around Charlie’s shoulders. An average-sized little boy, he’d shot up seemingly overnight in high school until he towered above even Harvey. There had been one memorable year where they’d had to buy him new pants on a monthly basis just to keep his ankles covered.

“Let’s have a look at you,” Charlie said, holding him at arm’s length and glancing him up and down. Simon laughed, clapping him on the shoulder before shrugging out of his grip.

“Dad, I’m twenty-three years old. I don’t look different than last time I was here.”

“You say that, but parents can always tell.” Charlie grinned at him again, just a little watery-eyed. “It’s good to see you, kiddo. I missed you!”

“I missed you guys too. Speaking of which…” Simon looked over his head, scanning the platform. “Where’s Pops?”

Charlie flapped a hand in the direction of the farm. “Oh, he’s up with Amelia. They’ll meet us in the Square, shouldn’t be long.”

Simon laughed at this, glancing up at the sky. “Seriously, again? Making any progress with the fear of heights?”

“Of course he is,” Charlie declared loyally. Coming up beside him, Maru let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “Okay, maybe not fast progress , but you know. It’s coming along.”

“Hey Aunt Maru, Uncle Shane,” Simon greeted their friends, coming forward for a group hug. “Got someone I want you to meet. She’s just waiting for our stuff.”

Truth be told, Charlie had been looking forward to this almost as much as seeing his son again. He hadn’t really done the math, but he suspected the breakdown of their phone conversations over the last six months had been about 25% how the tour was going, 10% how Simon himself was doing, 15% how Charlie, Harvey and the farm were doing. And the remaining 50%? Lucia. Charlie had listened to hours of descriptions of how talented Simon’s bandmate was, how smart and funny she was, how she always picked the best restaurants, how she knew everything, how she loved dogs. And as loudly as Simon insisted they were just friends, Charlie only knew his other friends’ names and instruments; he knew Lucia’s hometown, birthday, favorite color, and opinion on cilantro (bad, soapy), among other things.

They made their way down the platform together, unusually crowded today, and as the sea of people thinned out, a young woman came into view. She crouched down in artfully shredded jeans, checking the latches on a guitar case; as she straightened, tossing a waist-length sheet of gleaming blue hair over her shoulder, Simon waved at her. She turned and smiled, and Charlie understood why Simon had been so besotted. Lucia was gorgeous, dark eyes and a wide smile peering out from under that navy-blue mane.

“You found someone with longer hair than you,” Maru teased, reaching up to tug a lock that had fallen out of Simon’s haphazard bun. “I’m impressed.”

“I haven’t— found anybody,” Simon protested, though his cheeks went flaming pink. “We’re not dating. C’mon, Aunt Maru, I was counting on you to be the cool one.”

Maru turned to Charlie and Shane, grinning delightedly. “The cool one! Told you, Shane.”

Simon stepped away to collect Lucia, and Shane rolled his eyes at Maru. “Come on. That kid wouldn’t know cool if it slapped him in the face. Ask Amelia, she knows what’s cool.”

“You only say that because you’re her favorite.”

“Case in point.”

“Guys,” Simon said, returning to their little huddle, “this is Lucia, our drummer. Lu, this is my aunt Maru and my uncle Shane. My godparents.” Up close, Lucia was tall. Shorter than Harvey, definitely, but significantly taller than Charlie. He felt a sudden gratitude for Maru; at least he didn’t have to look up at everyone around here.

“Mr. Shane, Mrs. Maru, I’m so happy to meet you. Simon talks about you all the time.”

“It’s ‘doctor,’ actually,” Shane said, and Maru punched him on the arm.

“Shane! Shut up, nobody cares.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Dr. Shane.”

“She’s a doctor, too,” he added, jerking a thumb at Maru. Lucia looked across her face at Simon, who pinched the bridge of his nose. (Every time he did that, Charlie marveled at how much he looked like Harvey—despite being three inches taller, olive-skinned and black-haired, and generally not actually looking like Harvey at all.) 

“Lu, I know you don’t know them yet, but they’re just messing with you. I’m sorry. I did warn you they were gonna be annoying.”

“You did.” She looked between them, smiling. “And Sy told me what you do for a living, I just forgot who was who. Are you actually both doctors, then?”

“Yes, we are,” Maru cut in, before Shane could keep antagonizing her. “He’s a vet, I’ve got a PhD, Harvey’s an MD, we’re all very impressive around here.”

“Except me,” Charlie piped up, deciding they’d had long enough to harass the poor girl. Simon turned to him, looking relieved.

“And this is my dad, Charlie. One of my dads, anyway.”

“Mr. Charlie,” Lucia said, beaming. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Just ‘Charlie,’ please. We keep it casual around these parts.” He shot a warning glare at Shane, who rolled his eyes. “We’re so glad you could make it, Lucia. The way Simon talks about you, Harvey and I feel like we know you already.”

“Really,” she said, looking delightedly at Simon. He turned an impressive shade of red again, turning abruptly toward their luggage.

“Okay then! Let’s get our stuff!”

They stashed their bags in the lobby of the clinic. “Sorry we can’t head to the farm right away, kiddo,” Charlie said, locking the front door as they filed back out. “They close the road to cars during the Fair, and it’d be a long walk with all that stuff.”

“It’s fine. The grange judging is happening soon anyway, right? They’d better get down here soon, they’re going to miss—”

“Sy!” shrieked a familiar voice, and Charlie turned to see them approaching: Harvey, grinning and walking with his hands in his pockets, and the short, fast-moving blur of his daughter. Amelia flung herself at Simon, leaping up to throw her arms around his neck. Simon’s face disappeared altogether behind her cloud of curly hair. “You’re home!”

“Hey, old sport!” Simon laughed, squeezing her for a long moment. “Did you actually get shorter? How does that happen?”

“Rude! This is supposed to be a nice moment.”

“Sorry, sorry. You look exactly the same height as always.”

To Charlie, it was a nice moment. Simon had grown a little reserved as he’d gotten older, but around the irrepressible energy tornado of Amelia, he turned back into a carefree kid. Charlie had been a little concerned that he might put on a show for Lucia—the cool guy, the aspiring rock star, far too worldly and mature for his baby sister—but apparently, his worries had been unfounded. It warmed him to the core, seeing his kids joking together again. Even old sport had made a comeback, the teasing nickname the whole family had taken to calling Amelia when she’d become momentarily obsessed with The Great Gatsby in middle school.

Charlie had been prepared for another round of introductions; he had not been prepared for Amelia to release Simon, turn to a beaming Lucia with her arms wide, and greet her like a long-lost sister. “Luce!” she cried, pulling Lucia into another enormous hug, right as Lucia shouted, “Ames!”

“I can’t believe you’re here! This is so exciting!”

“I know!”

“Wait,” Charlie said, looking between the two of them with dawning suspicion. “You know each other?”

“Duh,” Amelia pronounced. “We’ve been emailing back and forth for like a year. And talking on the phone sometimes.”

“What the hell!” Charlie protested, rounding on Simon. “ Amelia gets to talk to Lucia, and we don’t? Why not?”

“Because I knew you two would be embarrassing,” Simon said, totally unrepentant, while Amelia and Lucia chatted excitably.

“And Amelia’s not embarrassing?”

“Hey!” Amelia snapped.

“Of course she is,” Simon said, earning another bark of protest from his sister. “But she’s nineteen. She has an excuse. And there’s still hope for her; you guys are always gonna be embarrassing.”

“I’m not sure he’s wrong, sunflower,” Harvey murmured, coming up beside him. Charlie scowled, but Simon ignored him, stepping forward and pulling Harvey into a long hug.

“Hi, Pops.”

“My boy,” Harvey said, holding him at arm’s length exactly the same way Charlie had; apparently it was some sort of standard dad move they’d both picked up over the years. “We’re so glad you’re home. And that you finally brought Lucia!” he added, turning his smile on her. “Charlie and I have been so excited to meet you.”

“Oh, yes, you too, thanks,” Lucia said, stammering just a little. Charlie understood; they got this reaction a lot. If the years had been kind to Charlie—he was still as fit as ever, and while his hair had gone a little bit gray in parts, he’d at least kept most of it—they had been ludicrously, unfairly generous to Harvey. He had transformed over the last decade or so into a bona fide silver fox, his thick hair and tidy beard going gloriously salt-and-pepper. He’d also let Amelia pick out clothes for him for the past six years or so, and under her adventurous eye, his wardrobe had taken a slightly eclectic, Jeff Goldblum-y turn. On Charlie, the outfits would have been absurd—but on tall, slender, distinguished-looking Harvey, everything worked. (Once, on a trip to Zuzu City, a barista had shyly asked him where she’d seen him before. The answer was nowhere, but Charlie got it: between the clothes and the hair, Harvey just kind of looked famous nowadays.) The sight of him regularly made Charlie’s mouth go dry. It was a good thing they were married; Charlie’s staring could be interpreted as how sweet, still so in love after all these years instead of just obnoxiously thirsty.

“Dad. You’re doing it again,” Amelia complained, and Charlie made a mental edit: everyone except his children thought his staring was sweet. He looked away with effort, snagging Amelia in the crook of his elbow and ruffling her hair.

“How’d you do up there, sweet pea?”

“Killed it. As usual.” She grinned up at him, unabashedly self-confident. “I keep telling Papa I’m ready to solo, but he still won’t let me.”

“Honestly, he needs the practice more than you do. How long did it take him to stop shaking this time?”

“Six minutes, thirty seconds. Almost a new record!”

Often, when people looked at their little family of four—almost a set of nesting dolls, with five-foot-one Amelia on one end and six-foot-six Simon on the other—they got the impression that each of the children took after one of their parents, Amelia with Charlie and Simon with Harvey. Charlie could understand how people got this impression. Amelia was the human embodiment of enthusiasm, always bouncing from one thing to another, usually talking a mile a minute while she did it. She’d never met anyone she couldn’t talk to (or at least at); it was a good thing she’d grown up in safe little Pelican Town, because keeping her from talking to strangers would have been impossible. Meanwhile, Simon tended to hang back in groups, listening intently but rarely speaking until he was spoken to. Charlie supposed this reminded people of Harvey, who was still as adorably shy as ever at sixty-four.

But in truth, almost everyone had it backward. Simon was quiet at a party, it was true—but put him in front of a crowd with a microphone and a guitar, and he came to life in a way that had to be seen to be believed. He drew his energy from other people, from adoring fans and applauding audiences. He craved the spotlight as intensely as Harvey shied away from it, and on top of all that, he had an impulsive streak to rival Charlie’s. His current situation was a perfect example: having finished school almost two years ago, he’d been earning a steady, reliable living as a session musician for a studio in Zuzu City. Then he’d done one session for the group Lucia had been trying to put together, she’d asked him if he’d ever considered joining a band, and a month later, he was living in their tour bus.

And Amelia? His daughter was the most hardcore, irrepressible, dyed-in-the-wool nerd Charlie had ever met. (And he’d been married to Harvey for over two decades.) The mental algorithms that decided what would hook her attention next were a mystery to everyone except Amelia herself, but once she’d had her interest piqued, literally nothing would stop her from pursuing it. They’d been through long phases of chemistry, entomology, robotics (under the thrilled and watchful eye of her Aunt Maru), Latin, advanced math, Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy novels. Watching her flit from one obsession to another, Charlie and Harvey had spent years speculating what she would eventually end up doing with her life; it felt like watching a roulette wheel, flying through possibilities so quickly they blurred together, trying to guess where the ball would land.

For now, Amelia’s wheel had come to a stop on farming, to Charlie’s delight. She was headed into her sophomore year at Ferngill U, studying agricultural science. Each break, she came back with some new development to help the farm: soil testing, beneficial insects, companion planting. Charlie was happy to let her work her magic. He’d been a very successful farmer, but mostly out of a combination of hard work and luck; he’d done very little science around the place, and he was relieved to have someone thinking about these things. Their crops and animals were thriving more than ever under her care.

A month before Amelia’s eighteenth birthday, Charlie and Harvey had sat down with her to discuss a surprise they’d been planning. They’d wanted to buy her a car to take to school, as they’d done for Simon when he’d left for college. But Amelia had surprised them: when they’d asked her what kind of car she’d like, she had pulled a Calico Desert newspaper clipping out of her pocket, smoothing it out on the table. The clipping had been an ad for a used Mooney M20 four-seater airplane.

Charlie wasn’t used to being the one in the relationship to show restraint, but Harvey was too busy geeking out with their child, and someone had to be the responsible adult here. They’d had weeks of conversations: was it safe? Could they afford it? Was it going to hold Amelia’s interest long enough to be worth it? Would Amelia be able to fly it to school? Would she regret not having a car once she got there? After a ton of research, months of lessons, multiple trips to the desert (including one with Maru so she could scour every inch of the thing for defects), and a lot of nail-biting, it turned out the answers to those questions were yes, yes, yes, after a few more lessons, and no. And while the flying still made him a little nervous (why had they not anticipated this when he’d let Harvey talk him into naming their daughter Amelia?) , so did the idea of their eldest son traveling cross-country with a rock band. On some level, to be a parent was to be anxious, but Charlie didn’t want to pass that fear onto their kids. They’d bought the plane, Amelia had learned to fly like a champ, and finally, finally Harvey had been sufficiently motivated to work on his fear of heights.

“You all set up?” said Amelia, bringing him back to the present. She gestured toward the grange boxes, a dozen yards away. There had been more of them these last few years. Marnie and Pierre still competed, as did Charlie, of course. Barbara’s daughter Liz had put together a display of mouth-watering goods from her bakery, and on the end of the row…

“Sure,” Charlie said airily. “Not sure I needed to work so hard, though. The competition looks a little thin this year.”

“You’re going to regret that,” Amelia promised, wagging a finger in his face. “Sy, Lucia, come check out my display. The elders need their rest.”

“Watch it, whippersnapper,” Charlie called after her. As the three of them walked away, Harvey leaned in, brushing a kiss across Charlie’s cheek.

“How did her stuff look?”

“Amazing. She seriously might beat me this year.”

“Sixth time’s a charm,” Harvey murmured, smiling. “Any other kid would have given up by now.”

“That’s our girl,” Charlie agreed. “Your perfectionism and my stubbornness. A lethal combination.”

“Any other dad might have let her win by now, too,” Marnie said as she tidied her display, eavesdropping as unabashedly as ever. Charlie let out a scandalized noise.

“No way! I respect her too much as a competitor.”

“You don’t just want to keep adding to your ribbon collection?”

“Not at all. When my kid beats me, she’s going to know she earned it. She can be proud of herself.” Harvey gave a nod of solidarity, and Charlie eyed Marnie’s basket of multicolored eggs. “Anyway, it’s not like you’d let her win, even if I did.”

“She’s not my child,” Marnie said airily. “I don’t have to.”

“A convenient excuse.” Charlie turned back to Harvey, intending to ask his opinion on the positioning of the produce in his display (should the pomegranates and the sunflowers be next to each other for contrast, or would the beets look better in that spot?), but noticed his husband wincing. “You okay, darlin’?”

“Ah, it’s just my back,” Harvey sighed, bracing a hand against it. “From Charlotte’s little fall yesterday. I shouldn’t have tried to move her myself, it’s my own fault. I’m not thirty anymore.”

Charlie reached up to stroke the hair out of his eyes, feeling the same bittersweet pang he always did when they brushed up against this subject. “No, you’re not,” he agreed. “Thank Yoba. That would make me a real cradle-robber.” They’d been discussing the idea of Harvey’s retirement for years now, and hadn’t come to any satisfying conclusions. He was ready to step back from clinic work, but not until he could find a replacement doctor who satisfied his requirements. As far as Charlie could tell, these included medical competency, good bedside manner, a willingness to devote their entire life to the well-being of the village, and an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that had ever happened to anyone in Pelican Town. Easy.

“All right, boys,” came Lewis’s voice from behind them. “Shall we get this show on the road?” Lewis was in his late eighties now and walking with a cane, but still healthy and sharp as a tack. Around ten years ago, he’d decided to retire from mayoring—but no one had stepped up to run, and so he’d ended up winning the election by default. Charlie wasn’t sure who would take over once Lewis actually retired. Maybe he’d just stay mayor forever, living well into his hundreds out of sheer habit.

“I’m ready,” Charlie declared, leaning around Marnie to raise his voice at Amelia. “If my opponents are done fraternizing.”

Amelia snorted, as Simon and Lucia left her and headed into the crowd. “I was born ready, old man.”

“I’m going to extract myself before this escalates,” Harvey said, leaving Charlie with a kiss on the forehead. “Enjoy your trash talk, children. Try to keep it civil.”

The first year Charlie had competed in the grange display, he’d thought the judging had taken forever. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but in the moment, it had been interminable. But the last few years, competing against Amelia, had made that first one feel like a breeze. Charlie’s daughter was a good loser, covering her disappointment with bluster and declarations about next year, but he always saw her shine a little dimmed in the weeks after each loss. She worked hard, harder than any teenager Charlie had ever met, and he desperately wanted her hard work to be rewarded. (Amelia’s first grange competition had been the first moment in his life Charlie had ever felt like a legitimate grown-up: realizing he wanted his child to win more than he wanted it for himself had been a staggering revelation.)

This year, Amelia’s hard work had paid off in some truly ridiculous ways. Half her grange box was occupied by a single pumpkin the size of a Smart Car, and she wouldn’t tell Charlie how she’d managed to grow it that big (“I’ll tell you after I win, Dad”). A pile of smooth, oblong blue fruits nestled around it, which were apparently some kind of ancient fruit she’d managed to resurrect from a preserved seed. Beside those sat a jar of an alarmingly black paste— void mayonnaise, she’d called it, a recipe she’d learned from Krobus and produced using void eggs from Shane’s void chicken. (Morrigan had hatched from the egg Charlie had bought from Krobus, and had apparently stopped aging once full-grown; she’d been around for over twenty years with no visible changes, laying her horrible black eggs every day and looking malevolent. But Harvey’s fears had been unfounded—in every other sense, Morrie was a completely average chicken. No murders had ever taken place in the coop.)

Charlie found, once the judging was underway, that he’d lost his appetite for trash talk. He watched as Lewis examined Amelia’s giant pumpkin, her strange blue fruits, and tried to guess at what he might be writing down based on the movements of his pen. After two fruitless minutes of this, he gave up and turned his attention to his most reliable source of calm. Harvey stood near the front of the crowd, surrounded by the little cluster of Simon, Lucia, Maru, and Shane. The other four talked excitedly around him, but Harvey was quiet, his eyes fixed on Charlie. When Charlie met his gaze, his husband smiled at him, just as he had at during that first grange competition two and a half decades ago. He gave a little nod, and Charlie didn’t know whether it meant you’re going to win or she’s going to win or just I’m proud of you both, but it warmed him through all the same. He returned the smile, feeling his nerves settle a bit.

Finally, Lewis made his way through all the competitors, and finally, he gave his speech about how talented and deserving each of them were. And as Charlie wrung his hands hard enough to bruise his fingers, Lewis finally announced, “The winner of this year’s grange competition, with 107 points, is...Amelia!”

“YES!” Charlie bellowed, not even realizing he was going to yell until his mouth opened. He punched both fists into the air, feeling the loss as though it were a victory, as though he’d won ten times over. 107 points, that was a perfect score, she’d not only beaten him but beaten the record, he was maybe going to cry in front of everyone he knew and he didn’t care. Before he could rush down the row and sob all over his baby girl like the embarrassing father he was, Amelia barreled past Marnie, Pierre, and Liz, flinging herself into Charlie’s arms.

“I did it!” she cried, a bit muffled from pressing her face into Charlie’s shirt. “Dad! I won!” She turned her face up to him, flushed with her victory, and grinned. Charlie’s face hurt from smiling. His daughter was driven and talented and brilliant, and he was proud and grateful for all that—but she was also a teenager still willing to hug her old dad in front of the whole town, and that was worth more to him than all the prize ribbons Lewis could ever hand out.

“Congratulations, sweet pea,” he murmured into her hair. “I’m proud of you.”

In the next moment they were surrounded. Harvey’s arms went around them first, then Simon’s, then Maru’s and Marnie’s and Shane’s. (While Shane’s vocabulary was still as prickly as ever, some of his sharper edges had worn down over the years. He’d lost his disdain for hugs by the time Amelia was two. Charlie still found it hilarious to be embraced by a man whose primary terms of endearment were farm boy, asshole and motherfucker, but he appreciated the affection anyway.) Charlie couldn’t make out a word over the din of everyone congratulating her at once, but he got the general gist. Looking up, he saw that the rest of the town was cheering equally raucously. Penny and James clapped along with their teenage triplets, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily (who everyone in town referred to as Em, in deference to the “first” Emily). Richard stood with Jas, her husband Ray, and her two young kids, all cheering as though they didn’t mind Marnie’s loss one bit. Sam’s son Nathan waved to Simon, Sam smiling with a hand on his shoulder. From every angle, love and support flowed toward them, and Charlie felt wholly, completely at home.

The hug broke up eventually. Maru and Shane drifted away to chat with Jas; Simon returned to Lucia, grinning sheepishly. Amelia immediately tore off to the prize stand with Charlotte, Anne, and Em. Only Harvey didn’t step away, keeping an arm slung comfortably around Charlie’s waist.

“This is the strangest feeling,” Harvey said. “Am I supposed to console you or congratulate you? Or both?”

“No consolation required. I’ve honestly never been happier to lose.”

“You’re a good dad.” Charlie felt Harvey’s lips against the top of his head, and let his eyes fall closed. He was grateful the grange competition was held in the morning; he felt much better prepared to enjoy the Fair now that his nerves had settled.

And, he reminded himself, he could finally ask Amelia how she’d grown that damn pumpkin.

When he opened his eyes again, Simon and Lucia had made their way back over. “So, dads,” Lucia said. “Simon tells me there’s an order you have to do things at the Fair?”

“Oh, yes,” Charlie said, as Harvey nodded sagely beside him. “We’ve developed a specific sequence of events for maximum enjoyment and minimal backtracking. It’s been the work of a lifetime.”

“The Fair’s only been this big since I was fourteen, dad. It’s not even the work of my lifetime.”

“I’m intrigued,” Lucia said, wisely ignoring Simon. “Any chance you’d be willing to show me how it’s done?”

You picked a good sport, Sy, Charlie thought.

“We’d be honored.” Harvey stepped forward, gesturing toward the Stardrop. “There’s a rigorous schedule, of course, but tradition dictates beginning with lunch.”

“Lead the way.”

It had been many, many years since Charlie and Harvey had anyone new to show around town. Simon had brought one or two friends home from school before, but usually not for the Fair. And at the time, Simon had been stuck in a phase of being deeply embarrassed by everything— his dads, his neighbors, his wholesome little town. It hadn’t lasted long, fortunately, but tours of the village weren’t much fun when the tourists were scoffing teenage boys. They’d nodded and shrugged their way through Charlie and Harvey’s explanations, retreating as quickly as possible to Simon’s cabin (a tiny shed they’d converted for him when he turned fourteen).

But Lucia was an excellent guest. She asked questions, listened attentively to stories, played carnival games with a competitiveness to rival Charlie’s, laughed at their very worst dad jokes. She was friendly to the endless parade of neighbors who greeted her, always asking them about themselves and the town. She listened for far longer to Shane’s rambling explanation of chicken genetics than anyone ever had, not walking away until Maru cut in and rescued her. When Harvey beat her in the slingshot game, she thumped her fist on the stall and blurted out a loud “Fuck!” before turning brilliant scarlet and covering her mouth with her hands (Charlie, whose wires had obviously been crossed by his years of friendship with Shane, found this incredibly charming).

And she obviously cared about Simon. When Harvey lapsed into a moment of nostalgia, mentioning the year Simon had spent his entire allowance on bags of popcorn and fed every kernel to Shane’s chickens in the petting zoo, she pressed him for more details: how old he had been, whether he’d liked all animals or chickens were his favorite, what he’d looked like as a little boy. Harvey had promised to show her baby photos back at the house, and though Simon had blushed and groaned “Pops,” he hadn’t actually argued. Charlie got the distinct impression that Simon wanted her to know these things about him, that he was pleased by her interest. He carefully filed all these bits of evidence away to pore over and dissect with Harvey later.

Hours into the afternoon, Simon stepped away to talk with Nathan. Sam’s son was twenty, still in school for music, and clearly thought Simon was some kind of god. He hung on his every word, asking questions about the tour in such a rapid-fire way it sounded as though he’d made a list in advance. (He probably had.) Charlie took the opportunity to fetch beers for the rest of them, and when he came back he found Harvey and Lucia engrossed in a friendly argument about jazz.

“I just wasn’t really raised with it,” Lucia was saying. “But I have a ton of respect for it.”

“But Lucia, so much of the music we listen to now has its roots in jazz!” This was a line of argument Charlie had heard approximately 400,000 times in the last twenty-six years, and he prepared a new conversational prompt for when Lucia politely dismissed it.

But to his surprise, she didn’t. “Of course,” she agreed. “I mean, ‘Pretty’ Purdie made me want to play the drums, and obviously he wouldn’t have been doing what he did without Art Blakey, so I totally get it. It’s just not my thing personally.” She accepted her beer from Charlie, smiling in thanks. “I’d love to be proven wrong, though. Maybe you can play me some of your favorites back at the house.”

If Charlie squinted, he could almost make out the cartoon hearts in Harvey’s eyes. “I would love to,” Harvey gushed. “In fact, I’ve got a pressing of Krupa and Rich that—”

“Hey, Lu,” Simon interrupted, returning to the group. “Think we should start getting ready.”

“Got it. Sorry, Dr. Harvey. I’d love to hear it later, though.”

“Oh, please, just ‘Harvey’ is fine,” he stammered, as Simon led Lucia away toward the clinic. Charlie slipped his fingers through Harvey’s, laughing.

“Do you have a crush on her now?”

“Charlie. She talked about Art Blakey.”

“I heard.”

“She wants to listen to jazz.”

“I know, darlin’.”

He looked down at Charlie, seeming to break out of his trance. “Simon has good taste, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he does,” Charlie declared, tugging him off toward the stage. “We raised him.”

Standing near the stage outside the Stardrop, Charlie could hardly believe Gus had ever struggled to pay the bills. The beer garden overflowed with people, and an equally dense crowd milled around in the “dance floor” area in front of the stage. Charlie didn’t recognize the band that currently occupied it, a group of folk musicians about his own age who played some kind of lively (and, frankly, kind of annoying) jig. But he wanted to get a good spot to watch the next performance, so he took up a post near the center of the crowd with Harvey and did his best to look like he was enjoying the music.

It was a good spot for people-watching, though. There was the usual conglomeration of tourists, of course, and more familiar faces. Emily and Sandy danced together, and based on their rhythm and style, Charlie guessed they were hearing something completely different than he was. Abigail, Sebastian and Sam leaned against the patio railing, talking animatedly. There were differences in this little group: Sam’s elaborate hairstyle had given way to something shaggier and less maintenance-intensive; Sebastian had stopped both smoking and dyeing his own hair, which was now a chestnut brown; Abigail was tough and muscular and wore the scars of her many expeditions into caverns and mines. And a few feet away, Jas stood back, smiling as her husband Ray danced with their two children. Charlie racked his brain for their ages—there were a lot of kids in his life these days—and drew a complete blank. He nudged Harvey, nodding in their direction.

“How old are Jas’s kids now?”

“Ada is four and Theo is two,” Harvey said instantly. He never had lost the mental encyclopedia about their fellow villagers, even when those villagers had grown up and moved away and taken their children to a city pediatrician. Charlie often felt his age these days. He was still in great shape, no major health problems—they’d both been incredibly lucky there, minus one nightmarish cancer scare when Harvey was fifty-five that had turned out to be nothing—but he knew he’d slowed down a little in the fields, had to ask Harvey for more massages than he used to. And yet nothing, not even his own children going off to college and jobs, made him feel as old as seeing Jas. She’d been so little when he’d arrived in Pelican Town; he felt as though he’d known her for her entire life. And now she had two children, and one of them was only a little younger than she had been when they’d met. Charlie looked at her, standing off to the side and beaming with maternal affection, and thought, when the fuck did we all get so old?

Maybe she felt his eyes on the back of her neck, or maybe she’d overheard Harvey saying her kids’ names, because she turned to look at them. Her face brightening, she edged through the crowd and into their little pocket of space.

“Hi, you two,” she said, raising her voice above the music. “Where’s Amelia? Off celebrating somewhere?”

“She ran off with the triplets. Now that she’s finally beaten me, she’ll never give me the time of day again.”

“Oh, come on. We both know that’s not true.” She snorted. “Aunt Marnie is thrilled. This was the third year in a row she predicted Amelia would finally beat you. She’s already forgotten about the last two predictions, of course.”

“Of course.”

“How have you been?” Harvey asked. “Everything going well at work?”

“Oh, yeah, you know how it is. Crazy busy, but can’t complain.”

They made small talk about all the usual things: Ada’s preschool, Theo’s progress toward full sentences, Ray’s cooking, Jas’s patients. She launched into an apparently hilarious story about one of her nurses, Harvey doubling over with laughter while Charlie tried desperately to translate all the acronyms into comprehensible English. They remarked on Marnie’s newest calf, a sweet brown one who’d been born just a few days prior. Theo and Ada had been present for the birth, and precocious Ada had been telling the story at a blistering pace to anyone who held still long enough ever since. It was rare that they got such a long visit; Charlie wished he knew her kids better. Theo was young enough to be more or less a mystery, and Charlie suspected Ada was as smart and determined as Jas had been herself at that age.

“It’s been so great to see you,” he said, watching the kids twirling away with their dad. “I know you were just back for Moonlight Jellies, but you couldn’t stay as long then.”

“I know.” She grimaced, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s always so hard to get away from the practice, and then every time we’re here I wish we could stay longer. The kids love it on the ranch, I think they’ve gotten more fresh air in the last week than they have all year. And they adore Aunt Marnie, and Richard, and Uncle Shane and Maru.”

“It’s a nice place for kids,” Charlie agreed. “Don’t need me to tell you that, obviously.”

“Right.” They watched as Ray tossed Ada into the air, spinning her around; she shrieked with delight, Theo hopping in an excited circle. Jas let out a sigh, looking miles away for a moment. 

“Is everything all right?” Harvey asked. She nodded absently.

“Sure. It’s fine. Just...thinking, you know? I love my job, but sometimes I worry they’re missing out. And me, too. I never get to spend as much time with them as I want.” She offered Harvey a small, pained smile. “You had the best of both worlds. You got to be a doctor and a parent. It’s harder in the city.”

Harvey glanced at Charlie over her shoulder, and Charlie held his gaze for a long moment. He knew, without anyone speaking, that they were thinking the same thing. When Harvey turned back to Jas, he took off his glasses to polish them on his tie.

“Before you head back to the city,” he said, “can I buy you a drink? We can talk shop a little, and...there’s something I’d like to discuss. A business proposition.”

Jas looked at him, clearly intrigued, and her smile shifted into something brighter. “All right,” she agreed. “I’d like that.”

The folk music ended to a round of applause. (Charlie suspected part of the reason the stage had been built so near the beer garden was to ensure an enthusiastic crowd, no matter who was playing.) The lead—who played, what was that, an accordion?—thanked everyone and filed off stage, and then instruments were being rearranged and mic stands adjusted, and then Charlie couldn’t spare any more of his attention for conversation because—

An opening guitar chord sounded, sustained for a long moment. Charlie still didn’t know that much about music, all things considered. He knew a lot of jazz musicians, could identify most of Harvey’s favorites, could even take an educated guess about things like time signatures. But he knew Simon’s music like the back of his hand. During his son’s teen years, when he’d started to be really serious about music, he’d been adamant that nobody could hear the songs he wrote until he’d deemed them perfect—which he never did.  And so Charlie and Harvey had spent hours sitting on the ground below his window, listening to his deepening voice and increasingly complex chords, hearing his songs take shape. It wasn’t that they didn’t think he deserved his privacy; they were just so desperately curious, so excited to hear what Simon’s future would sound like.

The day the band’s first album had released, four months ago, Charlie had actually gotten up and to the mailbox before the mail came. He had done the feeding and grooming and milking for their sleepy and bewildered herd of animals, always keeping one ear out for the sound of tires on gravel. When the mail had finally arrived, halfway through checking the seals on their wine kegs, he’d dropped his tools on the floor of the shed and sprinted to the mailbox quickly enough to get a stitch in his side. He’d returned inside with their preorder copy to find Harvey waiting by the stereo with two cups of coffee, as impatient as he was. And then they’d spent the next two hours listening and relistening, examining lyrics, debating how Simon must have been feeling on this song or what he’d been thinking during that one. Amelia had arrived home for the summer a few weeks later, and they’d gone over it all again with her.

“This one’s the second track on the album, isn’t it?” Harvey asked, leaning close to keep his voice down. Charlie nudged him, grinning.

“You ask like you didn’t memorize the liner notes.”

“Okay, guilty as charged.” They listened for a long moment, still huddled together in their little bubble of paternal pride. “It sounds different without Mark and Connor and Panit.”

“Mm. At least we got the important ones.” Worn out from touring, Simon’s other bandmates understandably hadn’t been eager to double back halfway across the country to play a village festival. When Simon had suggested it, Charlie had assumed he’d come alone and perform a solo set; Lucia’s participation had been a happy surprise. The songs sounded different with only the two of them. They’d altered their arrangements, playing up Simon’s melodies and dialing back Lucia’s beats to keep from overwhelming the guitar. Charlie liked the band anyway, but he wasn’t going to complain about an opportunity to hear Simon better.

“Why do you think Lucia came with him?” Harvey murmured, several songs later.

“I have some theories.”

“I’m guessing it probably wasn’t just for a seaside retreat.”

“Doubtful, although this town is still charming as hell.”

“True.” Harvey looked around at the gathered crowd, at the Square that was both so familiar and so different. “I worried it might lose that when it started growing, but it hasn’t.”

“Some things just keep getting better with time,” Charlie said, winking. Harvey turned pink, smiling shyly at him as though Charlie hadn’t been relentlessly hitting on him for twenty-six years running. It was still one of Charlie’s favorite looks on him.

He was distracted enough by his adorable husband, he hadn’t noticed the song ending. “Thanks so much, everybody,” Simon was saying. Charlie and Harvey stopped flirting and paid attention. “It’s really good to be home. There’s a lot of things you miss when you’re touring. Festivals like this one. Summer in the Valley. Gus’s cooking.” There was a rumble of laughter and a smattering of applause from the crowd, and Gus raised his drink with a grin. One of his grandkids—Charlie could never remember if that one was Artie or Marty, they were only a year apart and nearly identical—hugged him around the legs. “And this year, unfortunately, I missed something big.

“All of you were here, so you know my dads celebrated twenty-five years of marriage this summer. I hear there was a great party. Wish I could have been there, but we couldn’t make the timing work out.” Simon met Charlie’s eye, smiling regretfully, and Charlie smiled back. He’d wished Simon could be there, too, but he could never be upset that his son was finding success at his dreams. Harvey wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “So if you don’t mind, we’re going to play something a little outside our usual style. One of their favorites. We’ll just need a little help from a friend. Nate?”

Simon stepped away from the microphone and put down his guitar, turning around to reach into a case off to the side. From the corner of his eye, Charlie saw Nathan climb onto the stage and settle himself at the piano; Lucia gave him an encouraging smile. When Simon straightened again, he held a muted trumpet in his hands. Charlie glanced up at Harvey, who was watching the proceedings with obvious excitement; he met Charlie’s eye and grinned.

“I haven’t seen him play the trumpet since he was twelve,” Harvey whispered. “Do you think he’s been practicing?”

Nathan came in first, playing a series of soft, wistful arpeggios, and Charlie instantly knew the song. Judging by the way Harvey’s arm tightened around him, he did, too. After about twenty seconds, Simon and Lucia came in together, and yes, Simon had clearly been practicing. The smoky opening notes of It Never Entered My Mind floated through the crowd, as familiar to Charlie as Harvey’s voice. He found himself transported back in time, more than twenty-five years earlier, turning slowly on the rug in Harvey’s old apartment and feeling real love coursing through him for the first time in his life.

If someone had asked him back then, in the breathless early days just after he and Harvey had declared their love for one another, he would have confidently asserted that he’d reached the full capacity of his heart—that he was so in love, the feeling couldn’t be improved upon. Now, standing in Harvey’s arms with twenty-five years of adventures and joys and heartaches and surprises between them, he wanted to laugh at that naive, arrogant boy. The kind of love he felt for Harvey now had evolved so much, it was practically a different species. And of course, he felt so much for Simon and Amelia, it sometimes seemed as though he’d grown entirely new chambers of his heart to contain it all.

He felt the brush of Harvey’s beard against his temple, bringing him back to the present day. “Dance with me?” Harvey whispered, and Charlie turned to face him. Their hands found their positions without discussion, the result of two decades of practice. Looking up into Harvey’s beloved face, a little more lined and a lot more gray but even more handsome than ever, Charlie saw all his own thoughts reflected there. (Eventually, they’d more or less gotten the hang of the ESP thing.) Charlie smiled at him, trying to transmit all he felt without words.

“It just occurred to me,” Harvey murmured, “do you think he knows this is a sad song?”

“I don’t think he’s ever heard it with lyrics. We’ve only ever played him the Quintet version.” Charlie tucked his head under Harvey’s chin, swaying to the music. “It doesn’t make me sad.”

“Me, either.”

“Or maybe he was hoping if he played something sad, we wouldn’t be as gross with our PDA,” Charlie joked. He thought he’d said it quietly, but from a few feet away, a chorus of laughs went up. Turning, he saw Amelia standing with Maru and Shane, watching them.

“He knows better than that,” Amelia said, rolling her eyes. Shane agreed.

“Twenty-five years in, you’re just as disgusting as ever.”

“Is that true?” Harvey leaned back, meeting Charlie’s eye again. “I really thought we’d toned it down. Are we disgusting?”

“Don’t listen to them,” Charlie assured him, going up on tiptoe to kiss Harvey’s cheek. “That’s just what people say when they’re jealous.”

Harvey caught Charlie’s chin and turned his head, kissing him on the lips instead; Charlie thought it was possible there were some derisive noises from the peanut gallery, but he wasn’t paying attention. As they broke away, he grinned at Harvey.

“I solemnly swear to keep disgusting our children for years to come,” he said, and Harvey beamed back at him. “And hey. Eventually we might have a whole new generation of kids to annoy.”

Before Harvey could respond to this, the song ended. They released each other but didn’t move apart, turning just enough to clap with everyone else. Simon’s eyes found them in the crowd, and Charlie and Harvey cheered at the top of their lungs. Charlie felt so much pride, so much gratitude, so much, period. And one glance at Harvey’s face told him he felt the same way. At his other side, he felt a denim-jacketed arm loop through his: Amelia, leaning against him as she cheered for her brother.

Once Simon had put his trumpet away and retrieved his guitar, he turned back to the crowd. Charlie fell silent again, surprised. Were they going to keep playing? It had seemed like a kind of finale, but maybe they were going to play a few more of their own songs? Amelia’s arm tightened around his, and looking down, he saw her biting her lip in a decidedly suspicious way. “What,” he demanded, holding her at arm’s length. “What do you know?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she managed, clearly fighting not to laugh.

“Amelia—”

“Oh, look, they’re going to start again!”

It was a painfully obvious deflection, but it was also true, and so Charlie shut up. “Hope you guys liked that one,” Simon was saying. “Like I said, that’s one of my dads’ favorites. A real classic. Very respectable.” He looked straight at Harvey, his smile turning into a smirk that couldn’t possibly bode well, and leaned in closer to the microphone. “But if you’ll hang in there for a few more minutes, we’d also like to play my dad Harvey’s real favorite song.”

“Oh no,” Harvey moaned.

“He wouldn’t,” Charlie assured him.

But he would, as it turned out. The first line of Take A Chance On Me filled the Square, and as their neighbors laughed, Harvey let out a sigh that seemed to come from his toes. “Well, we had a good run,” he said, raising his voice above the music. “Amelia, I’m sorry I have to disown your brother, but look on the bright side. You get everything in the will now.”

“She helped him plan it,” Maru volunteered cheerfully, earning a gasp of horror from Amelia. “She called him from our place, I heard her talking about it.”

“Aunt Maru!” Amelia cried. “That was a secret!”

“Betrayal all around,” Harvey said mournfully. “What happened to you two? I thought I raised honest, loving kids.” He raised an eyebrow at Charlie. “Did you know too? I might never recover from that.”

“Of course not,” Charlie said. “I’m loyal. You know me.” Harvey looked at Amelia, silently requesting confirmation, and she shook her head.

“He actually didn’t.”

“Sweet pea,” Harvey said, in a distinctly ominous tone, “I hope it was worth it. Because I’m going to buy a whole book of dad jokes and save them up for the first date you bring home.”

“I’m moving in with you guys,” Amelia declared instantly, rounding on Maru and Shane. “Least you can do after you sold me out.”

“We’ll...discuss it,” Shane said.

“You think you’ll be safe with them?” Harvey scoffed. “Maru and I saved up dozens of them when we were working together. It was the only way we could ever get Vincent to sit still for his vaccinations.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Ha. Maru, why did the scarecrow win an award?” he asked.

“Because he was outstanding in his field!” she replied, grinning, and Amelia threw up her hands.

“Yoba, I regret everything. I’m out of here.”

“Hi, Out Of Here, I’m Dad!” Harvey and Maru called after her in unison, and she covered both of her ears as she scurried away.

Later—after Simon had clambered down off the stage and hugged them both, and after Harvey had pretended to be angry for a full eight seconds before bursting out laughing, and after Charlie and Harvey had both foisted hugs upon Lucia too, and gotten Simon to collect his wayward sister again—Charlie had extracted Maru and headed off to the farm, leaving the others to pile Simon and Lucia’s belongings into the back of Shane’s truck. It would take a few minutes for the roadblocks to be cleared for the night, which gave Charlie the perfect opportunity to get home and finish setting up before everyone else made it back.

“How did you get it all done?” Maru asked him as they walked, her arm looped comfortably around his. “Without that nosy kid of yours finding out?”

“Well, conveniently, she was so hell-bent on keeping her grange box a secret from me, she stayed with the triplets the last two nights. I think she stashed that giant pumpkin in their shed.”

“Yoba. Penny and James are saints.”

“You’d have to be, to deal with three teenagers at once.” They were almost to the farm now, the house peeking through the gaps between trees, and Charlie put a hand over Maru’s. “Wait here for a minute, okay? I want you to see the full effect. One sec!”

He dashed up to the front porch, leaving a bemused Maru standing in the road, and found himself greeted by their fierce watchdog. Beverly intercepted him halfway up the steps, butting her head against his knees and refusing to move until the minimum acceptable number of scratches had been doled out. “Hey, sweet girl,” he murmured, ducking down to kiss the top of her brown head. “Gonna have some guests in a few. Get ready.” When she trotted away to investigate Maru, he found what he’d been looking for: the end of the extension cord he’d laid out earlier. He plugged it into the outlet on the front porch, turning and gesturing grandly.

“Okay, ready! What do you think?”

“Wow, dude,” Maru gasped, stepping wide-eyed onto the path with a panting Beverly in tow. “This must have been a ton of work.”

“Eh, some.”

Charlie wasn’t usually all that self-congratulatory, but in his humble opinion, he’d done a pretty great fucking job. The patch of grass in front of the farmhouse played host to a long wooden table, one of Robin’s Winter Star pieces she’d let him borrow. It was surrounded by seven chairs, each of them decorated with a swag of fall leaves and blackberries. A burlap runner spanned the length of the table, and he’d piled it with as many flowers and fruits as he could fit: tall vases of sunflowers, squat dishes of pomegranates and hazelnuts, garlands of fairy roses intertwining through it all. He’d put up posts in a semicircle around the table, and strands of string lights stretched from these to a central point above the porch, making a glowing canopy against the (eventually) darkening sky. On the porch, he’d placed a wooden sign reading CONGRATULATIONS, AMELIA! Maru pointed at this, raising an eyebrow.

“You were that sure she was going to win?”

“Of course I was.”

“What if she hadn’t?”

Putting a finger to his lips— our little secret— Charlie picked it up and flipped it over. The letters on the back read WELCOME HOME, SIMON! Maru laughed, nodding as Charlie settled it back in place.

“Solid backup plan. You had a good reason for a party either way.”

“Definitely.” Charlie hadn’t really needed a reason. Mostly, he was just thrilled to have both his kids—and the famous Lucia—back home, but Amelia’s win had given him an excuse to be a little extra about it. Their dinner party probably would have been lovely without the pomegranates, or the string lights, or the hundreds of flowers he’d packed into Amelia’s little cabin (inherited from her brother when he left home), but it had been a long time since he’d gone all-out.

He and Maru made their way inside, Beverly hot on their heels. “So. Did you actually need help cooking? Because if so, I’m not sure why you thought I’d be your best bet.”

“Nah. I just wanted someone to keep me company. Figured we’d leave Shane to do the heavy lifting.”

“That I can do.”

Forty-five minutes and a few cups of coffee later, Maru’s rambling explanation of her latest project (“I decided to finally just build my mom the power loader from Aliens, because fuck it, why not?”) was interrupted by the crunching of tires on gravel. Charlie turned off the stove and wiped his hands hastily on his apron, rushing out to the front porch before the truck could park. Almost before it had, Amelia leapt out of the truck bed, her jaw dropping.

“Dad! Oh my god!”

“A triumph six years in the making deserves a little celebration, don’t you think?” he asked, catching her as she dashed up the steps to hug him. “And a chance to show off in front of Lucia,” he added in an undertone, earning a snicker from his daughter.

“It’s so pretty,” she marveled, gazing overhead at the lights. “You did all this last night?”

“Most of it. Some of it I might have been doing in the wine shed for the last week.”

Amelia turned her gaze on him, her dark eyes a little damp, and beamed. “Thanks, Daddy,” she whispered, something she never called him anymore, and suddenly the air felt a little dusty to Charlie’s eyes too. She gave him a last little squeeze, then turned back toward the truck, wiping her eyes. “Papa! Did you help with this?”

“Not at all, darling,” Harvey called, stepping down out of the cab as Simon and Lucia clambered out of the bed. “Your dad had a vision. I didn’t dare interfere.” He crossed to the porch, tilting his face up to accept a kiss from Charlie. “Beautiful work, sunflower,” he added softly, and Charlie felt as warm and glowing as the string lights.

“Uncle Shane, don’t, let me get that,” Simon was saying, rushing to help him get their luggage from the truck bed. Shane waved him off, rolling his eyes.

“I’m fifty-six, kid, I’m not going to break my back lifting a damn guitar. Get the other one.”

“Simon said it was beautiful here, but wow,” Lucia said, turning slowly on the spot. “What a gorgeous place. You guys really work all this by yourself?”

“Not exactly,” Charlie hedged. “Harvey and I used to do most of it, but now Amelia does a lot, too. And we hire some of the teenagers around town to help during big harvests. There’s enough hands to go around, when we need them.”

“Is there anything I can give you a hand with now? For dinner?”

“That’s sweet of you to offer, Lucia, but actually, things are almost ready. Just need to let a couple things finish up in the oven and then carry it all outside.” Lucia nodded, staring up at the house, and an idea occurred to Charlie. “Want a little tour while we wait?”

She smiled at him, glancing across her face at Simon, who was now occupied in trying to ward off the luggage-carrying efforts of both Shane and Maru. “I’d love one.”

“You got it. Ames, you’re in charge here, all right? Keep an ear out for that timer. V, let’s show Lucia around.”

They’d given farm tours a hundred times; Charlie could do it in his sleep. He’d showed off the place to new neighbors, to students on field trips, to the governor during one Luau trip. He’d showed it to Qi, who’d finally visited from the desert after almost a decade of friendship, and to his mother, who had finally allowed herself to be dragged home by the irresistible lure of grandchildren. He knew what tidbits of farm life guests would find interesting (that enclosure on wheels is called a chicken tractor!) and which ones they’d prefer not to know (each cow produces almost 70 pounds of manure a day!). He knew which path to take at this time of day to show the fields off in their best light. He knew that the most efficient route took them through the barn, around the wine shed, past Amelia’s cabin, and across the little bridge he’d built over the pond a decade or so ago.

He was conscious, though, that the stakes were a little higher with this one. What was a governor, compared to the apparent love of his son’s life? Even if he’d chosen a different path for himself, the farm was in Simon’s blood. Charlie wanted to make Lucia fall in love with the place, to make her understand why it was special. Judging by the way Harvey squeezed his hand, he was thinking the same thing.

“You know what? I’m not sure we have time for the whole farm right now. It’s prettier at sunrise, anyway, if you don’t mind getting up.”

“As long as there’s coffee.”

“Definitely coffee.” Charlie smiled at her, gesturing up the steps. “We do have time for the house, though, if you want? There aren’t any farm animals, but there are baby photos.”

Lucia’s face lit up, and that was that. They squeezed their way in past Beverly, who was determined to go through the door at the exact same time as Charlie. In the kitchen, dishes covered every horizontal surface: platters of food ready to go outside, pots and pans Charlie hadn’t had time to scrub yet, a bowl of chips he and Maru had been snacking from. He hurried Lucia through to the living room, grimacing apologetically.

“It’s not in the best shape right now, sorry. Takes a lot of work to feed this crowd.”

“I don’t judge. Honestly, there are probably still dishes in the sink back in my apartment,” Lucia said. “It smells amazing. What are we having?”

“Don’t bother,” Harvey sighed. “He won’t even tell me. It’s some kind of big surprise, apparently.”

“Ooh. Can’t wait, then.”

There wasn’t much of interest in the living room—although Lucia made appropriately appreciative noises about the fire in the enormous stone fireplace—and they made a brief trek through Charlie and Harvey’s bedroom just so they could reach Harvey’s little office. Harvey showed her his shelves of model planes, his radio equipment, the collection of books and memorabilia he’d been receiving for Father’s Day gifts for years. Watching him explain it all, Charlie thought back to the first time he’d entered Harvey’s old apartment. How shy Harvey had been about it all, how embarrassed. He was a changed man now; apparently, decades of being relentlessly adored had chased away his bashfulness. (Mostly. Charlie could still get him to blush if he tried hard enough, and he did, often.)

Their tour got briefly derailed by a discussion about turntables (“Linn is great, Dr. Harvey, but if you’ve never listened on a Rega you’re missing out”), and Charlie had to hurry them out of the room before Harvey started digging through his vinyl collection in a quest to prove her wrong. As they reached the top of the stairs to the study, Lucia let out a gasp.

“What is all this stuff?” she asked, leaning down to squint at an enormous red crystal perched on a bookshelf. “It’s like a museum in here!”

Charlie was used to it all, and Harvey was the designated duster in their house, so he didn’t often notice the things that filled their study anymore. But he supposed it was pretty strange-looking from the outside. Their shelves still held mostly books, but here and there were tokens of his mining expeditions: crystals, fossils, the occasional bone or totem or old piece of armor. Gunther hadn’t wanted any of it, so he assumed it wasn’t especially valuable or rare, but it was kind of fun to remember a time when he’d been young and daring.

He still didn’t miss the mines, though.

“Charlie used to have some, ah, interesting hobbies,” Harvey offered, smirking at him. “And an unhealthy fixation on Indiana Jones.”

“And...a sword?” Lucia said, gesturing curiously to the wall above the mantel. She looked a little bewildered, glancing back and forth between it and the other artifacts in the room, and Charlie understood why. Harvey’s fastidiousness kept every object in this room clean, no matter how annoying—the nooks and crannies in one particular amethyst crystal had elicited a lot of swearing over the years—but the Galaxy Sword, mounted high up on the wall, was covered in a thick layer of dust. It stuck out a little, Charlie knew. He exchanged a glance with Harvey; how much should they tell her? How weird was too weird? After a moment’s silent deliberation, he nodded.

“That one’s a long story,” he said, “and kind of...a superstition thing. We’ll tell you about it some other time.”

“When we don’t have photos to look at,” Harvey added, gesturing to the former kids’ room, and Lucia hurried inside with a look of delight.

They were late for dinner—or rather, dinner was late, since Charlie was the one serving it. How could they not be, with Lucia making her way slowly down the back wall and asking questions about every photo hanging there? It would have been rude to hurry her along, Charlie reasoned. The food would keep; he might never have another opportunity to show off baby Amelia’s legendary dimples or toddler Simon’s wild hair.

“He never has liked haircuts,” Harvey chuckled, as Lucia examined a photo of eight-year-old Simon. He stood in the middle of a row of blueberries, grinning with purple-stained hands and two missing teeth—and tangled black hair down to his shoulders. “I think we maybe managed to coax him into one a year, if we were lucky.”

“It’s working for him now,” Lucia said. “You wouldn’t believe the number of ‘Simon’s hair appreciation’ posts on Twitter after every show.”

“Twitter,” Charlie gasped, “why have we never thought to check Twitter, V?”

“I don’t really know how to work Twitter,” Harvey admitted sheepishly. Lucia laughed, moving on to the next photo.

“You’re better off, trust me. Oh, this one’s so cute!”

It was so cute. It was maybe Charlie’s favorite, actually. In early summer, he’d headed out to weed the sunflower patch while Harvey was on clinic duty. That meant taking both kids with him—eighteen-month-old Amelia strapped to his back, and five-year-old Simon wandering along in his wake. The stalks stood knee-high on Charlie, reaching almost to Simon’s shoulders. Charlie had been raking up weeds Simon had helped pull, not paying any attention, when he’d heard a camera shutter go off. Harvey had come home early from work, and apparently his photo op senses had been tingling. There was nothing special about the moment in the picture—Amelia waving a dimpled hand at a passing butterfly, Simon smiling over his shoulder in surprise, Charlie whistling to himself as he raked—but that was why Charlie loved it so much. It was a tiny slice of their lives together, preserved exactly how he remembered it.

Harvey came up beside him, settling a hand in the small of his back; Charlie leaned into him, feeling unexpectedly emotional. He knew the “looking at baby photos” thing was a joke from old sitcoms—the parents threatening to embarrass their children by showing pictures to their dates. Outing them for their questionable hair decisions, their braces, their youthful fashion mistakes. But Charlie didn’t mean it as a threat. No part of him had ever wanted to truly embarrass his kids. Instead, he meant it as an homage, as a love letter. Look how much we’ve adored them, he tried to say without words, leading Lucia through the years of Simon’s and Amelia’s lives. Look what they’ve meant to us. Can you believe that out of all the kids in the world, we somehow got the best two?

“Dad, Pops,” Simon said from the doorway, as though summoned by his thoughts. “Ready to come down for dinner? We’ve been calling you.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” Charlie said, straightening up and smiling past the lump in his throat. “We’ll come down.”

“It’s my fault,” Lucia added. “They couldn’t hear you over all my screaming about how cute you were.”

Simon looked as though he wanted to roll his eyes, but he noticed what photo Lucia was standing in front of—still the one out in the sunflower patch. His eyes softened, and he reached out to straighten it minutely on the wall. “Well,” he said softly, “that is a pretty good one.”

“Yoba,” Amelia said through a mouthful of food, her eyes falling closed as she chewed. “It’s so, so good, Dad.”

“Amazing,” Simon agreed, as he heaped more macaroni and cheese onto his plate. Shane snorted, looking down the table.

“Martha Stewart would have a fucking aneurysm, though. What is this menu, farm boy?”

Maru let out a strangled laugh that she turned into a cough, holding her napkin up to cover her face. Charlie did his best to look haughty and indignant. “This menu is everybody’s favorites,” he said primly. “Super Meal for V, fancy mac and cheese for Simon, California rolls for Amelia. There’s pie for Maru later, too. And a salad so we don’t all fall into a carb coma for the next week.” It didn’t exactly go together, no, but everyone was happy, so Charlie thought it was perfect.

“What about me?” Shane demanded.

“Nothing for you, because I knew you’d bitch about something no matter what I made. Also, you eat anything. Don’t think I haven’t seen you get thirds of mac and cheese.”

“What makes it ‘fancy?’” Lucia inquired, derailing whatever retort Shane had been about to give. “It’s delicious, I’m just curious what the difference is.”

“Truffles,” Simon said. “Shaved ones in it, and truffle oil in the breadcrumbs.”

“Agnes finds them,” Amelia added. “Our pig.”

“A pig?” Her interest apparently piqued, Lucia glanced toward the barn. “How do you train a pig to hunt truffles? Doesn’t she eat them?”

“Oh! It’s actually a fascinating process,” Harvey volunteered, leaning forward eagerly. “Some people use dogs, but pigs have more sensitive noses, and actually they’re better at it because they want to eat them, the trick is…”

Charlie sat back and sipped at his wine, letting the atmosphere wash over him. The conversation had splintered off into a few little groups: Lucia and Harvey with their pig talk; Shane and Amelia discussing the merits of the California roll versus the Philadelphia, and which Gus made better; Maru asking Simon for tour stories. For once, Charlie didn’t feel the need to be part of the conversation. He was content just to listen, letting his attention drift between threads as the evening wore on. The sun was just beginning to set, the days growing shorter as they progressed into the fall. He found himself wishing he could pause its progression for a moment—that he could keep everything just like this, sitting around the table with his best friends, his children, and the love of his life.

And what a life it had been. The really amazing thing about it—the thing that sometimes kept him awake at night, tucking his face against the back of Harvey’s neck and marveling silently—was that it just kept getting better. He thought of Harvey, years and years ago, worrying that he’d maxed out his allotted quota of happiness. Charlie had never believed in such a thing, but now it had been disproved beyond a shadow of a doubt. He’d thought he was happy when he’d met Harvey; then he’d married him and reached heights he’d never imagined. Then Simon had come along, and Charlie had been certain that this was it, the best his life could possibly be. Four years later, when they’d gotten the call asking whether they might want another baby, he’d been almost afraid to say yes. Their lives were perfect; what if throwing another kid into the mix messed everything up somehow? But then they’d brought Amelia home, and watched her curl her chubby fist around Simon’s finger for the first time, and Charlie realized what a fool he’d been. Of course they needed Amelia. How had they ever muddled along without her?

And then his children had grown up, and Charlie had seen them become these funny, sweet, wonderful, talented people. Realizing that he and Harvey had done an okay job, that they’d raised such a good pair of humans, had filled him with relief and joy in equal measure. But Charlie was older and wiser now, and he knew better than to assume that this was the pinnacle of happiness. Every twist and turn of his life had made it better; surely it had a few more in store. He glanced across the table at Maru and Shane, now gleefully heckling Amelia about her giant pumpkin (“I mean, it’s big, but Cinderella couldn’t go to the ball in it or anything; try harder, kid”), at Simon, who had fallen silent. Sy wore a look Charlie recognized. It was one he reserved for only the most precious things on Earth: his sister as a baby; Beverly as a puppy; his first guitar, given to him by his Grandma Alice for his eighth birthday. Following the line of his gaze, Charlie saw that he was watching Lucia. She talked animatedly with Harvey, playing a set of imaginary drums in the air to illustrate whatever point she was making, and Harvey seemed to be almost choking on his wine with laughter.

When Charlie looked back at Simon, he seemed to finally realize he had an audience. He jumped a little, turning beet red, but smiled. Progress, maybe, Charlie thought to himself. He wrapped an arm around Harvey’s shoulders, and Harvey twisted around to face him, eyes warm in the glow of the lights overhead.

“Having a good time, my love?” he asked. Charlie pressed a kiss to his forehead, breathing him in, trying to memorize everything about the moment.

“The best,” he murmured at last.

Party or no party, farm life went on, and Charlie had work to do. After dinner, he went out to the barn, getting all the animals settled in for the night. Though the fields had grown past the point he and Harvey could work alone, they’d never expanded their barn. It was home to four cows, two sheep, one pig, and two goats; if they’d raised any more than that, they wouldn’t have been able to give each animal individual attention. Profit margins be damned: they could make their money from wine and vegetables. The barn animals were mostly overgrown pets, and everyone knew it (especially the animals).

He was just finishing up, pausing to give Dottie the cow some extra scratches around the ears (they’d run out of famous planes years ago, but Amelia had a list of potential pet names a mile long), when he heard the barn door creak open behind him. He turned, expecting Harvey or Amelia, and was surprised to see Lucia hovering on the threshold instead.

“Hi there,” he called, giving her a little wave. “Looking for Simon? Last I saw him, he was in the house, but—”

“Actually,” she said, coming inside and pulling the door shut behind her, “I was hoping you and I could talk for a sec. If that’s okay.”

“Of course,” Charlie said, curious. “What’s up? Oh, watch your shirt,” he added, as Gertrude, the youngest of the goats, decided it was worth a taste. Lucia gave a startled laugh, tugging her hem up out of the danger zone. Gertie seemed more or less content with head scratches as a substitute, leaning on Lucia’s legs.

“Sy’s talked about the village a lot,” she said. “He really misses it here.”

“We miss him, too.” The understatement of the year.

“He’s mentioned that there are some, well, kind of unorthodox traditions.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Certain things you have to do if you want to…” She trailed off here, clearing her throat and twisting a lock of hair that fell forward over her shoulder. “If you want to ask someone out, for example.”

Oh. Oh. It wasn’t entirely unexpected—of all Simon’s bandmates, only Lucia had taken the two-day trek home with him, after all—but Charlie had sort of assumed Simon would eventually get up the nerve to ask himself. The idea that Lucia was equally infatuated, that she’d traveled thousands of miles and waited all day to get one of Simon’s dads alone so she could do this the traditional way, made Charlie giddy with excitement. With effort, he reined it in. Kind of. “I assume we’re speaking strictly hypothetically,” he said, grinning. She returned it, a little nervous, but genuine.

“Of course.”

“Of course. Well. Some of our traditions are a little weird, but that one’s pretty straightforward. You just have to give someone a bouquet of flowers.”

She blinked at him, clearly not expecting this. “Flowers?” she repeated blankly.

“Yep. Usually you’d get them from Pierre’s shop, but there are alternatives.”

“Pierre’s...that shop on the Square?”

“That’s the one.”

“Shit.” Lucia grimaced, checking her watch. “He’s probably closed up for the night, huh.”

“Actually, he’s always closed on festival days, so you wouldn’t have been able to go today. Hypothetically speaking.” Lucia gave him a rueful smile. “There’s always tomorrow morning, if you still want to go. Or…” He trailed off, feigning nonchalance. The last thing he wanted was to come off as pushy, even if he was dying of excitement. Amelia and Simon had both told him on multiple occasions that there was such a thing as too helpful, and he’d done his best to take it to heart. (Really.)

Fortunately, Lucia took the bait. “Or…?” she prompted.

Charlie smiled. “Or, I do happen to know somewhere else you could get a bouquet this time of night.”

“Oh? Heck yeah! Where?”

Fifteen minutes later, Charlie stood on the packed-earth path through his flower field, watching as Lucia perused the rows with his floral snips in hand. “So do any of them, like, mean anything?” she asked, crouching down to squint at a black-eyed susan in the dim light. “Am I going to send some kind of bad message if I pick the wrong ones?”

“No, no,” Charlie said, waving a hand dismissively. “Nothing like that. Except…” A thought had dawned on him, and he felt his cheeks heat a little. “Maybe not sunflowers?”

“Why, what do sunflowers mean?”

“Nothing really, but that’s, um. That’s what Harvey calls me.” Lucia’s entire face lit up at this, her mouth falling open, and Charlie leveled his best glare at her. “Stop that.”

“No, I’m sorry, but that’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“We’re adorable. I know.” Lucia went back to shuffling through the flowers, still beaming, and Charlie reconsidered. “Maybe not sweet peas either, although I think those are all gone by now anyway.”

“Is that what you call Harvey?”

“No! It’s what we call Amelia,” Charlie protested, but Lucia found this hilarious too. Over her peals of laughter, he played his strongest card. “If you don’t stop laughing,” he called, “I’ll never tell you what we call Sy.”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “That’s cruel.”

“Mm. I’m ruthless, all right. Just ask my kids.”

“Fine,” she sighed. “No sunflowers, no sweet peas. Anything else?”

“That’s it. Just go with whatever grabs you.”

In the end, Lucia ended up with a fistful of fairy roses, poppies, and zinnias, a few towering stems of lupine, and a couple types of grasses to fill it out. She had a good eye, Charlie thought admiringly; her bouquet was much less pedestrian than the ones Pierre sold. Simon was going to love it (although Simon would have loved a dandelion from the side of the road, if Lucia had been the one to give it to him). They took it back to the barn, where Charlie helped her tie it together with some twine. It wasn’t exactly luxurious, but he thought it had a rustic kind of charm.

“Listen,” Lucia said, tucking her hair behind her ear, “this means a lot to me. That you would...help me with this. I know you don’t know me that well, but I really care about Simon.” She smiled at him again. “Now I just have to hope he says yes, I guess.”

Charlie laughed, harder than he’d intended, and Lucia looked at him curiously. “Lucia,” he began, “you’re from Misko Falls in the Fern Islands, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Your birthday is in the second week of fall, your favorite color is black, you hate cilantro but you pretend you like it because your mom puts it in everything, and you secretly love the band Chicago.”

Lucia tilted her head. “What is this? How do you know all that?”

“Simon,” Charlie said. “He never, ever stops talking about you. When you guys make it big, I can write your Wikipedia page from memory.” Lucia’s expression softened, and Charlie patted her on the arm. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, kid. Trust me on this one.”

Lucia blushed, smiling at him as she took the flowers back. “Simon always said you guys were the best dads in the world.”

Charlie felt a lump come to his throat at this, for what felt like the millionth time that day. “Well, what does he know,” he said briskly, winking to cover it. “He’s only got two.”

By the time they made their way back to the house, the party was breaking up. Shane and Maru had already left, and through the window Charlie could see the rest of his family: Amelia lay curled on the living room rug in front of the fire with Beverly, and Simon and Harvey were finishing up the dishes. Charlie gestured to the nearby cherry tree, his hand on the doorknob.

“Go wait over there,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ll send him to check on the chicken coop, he’ll find you.”

Lucia beamed at him. “Got it. Thanks.”

As she turned to go, Charlie remembered something. “Oh, by the way,” he added, and she turned back with a curious look on her face, “it was ‘string bean.’” At her blank expression, he added, “You know, ‘sunflower,’ ‘sweet pea,’ and…”

She looked as though Winter Star had come early. “Oh my god,” she whispered, clutching the bouquet in both hands. “String bean. You guys really are adorable.”

“Believe me, I know.”

When he stepped inside, Charlie stood for a moment, watching his husband’s and son’s tall figures at the sink. From the time Simon had been old enough to hold a dish without dropping it, their routine had been the same: Charlie cooked, Harvey washed, Simon dried. Charlie had always made himself scarce during the washing, because that was Simon-and-Papa time, a sliver of the day that was just for the two of them to talk. Charlie and Harvey had fully intended to have Amelia trade off with him once she was old enough, but Simon had turned out to be surprisingly possessive about his one-on-one time with Harvey. And so, dish drying duty had remained Simon’s responsibility, and Amelia had started joining Harvey for the morning barn rounds, her own solo Papa time. 

It did something funny to Charlie’s chest to see Simon back in his old spot. Charlie had known, academically, that he would miss his kids when they left home. He’d been proud of Simon when he left, was still proud of him, was glad to see him finding his way in the world. But he’d never realized that, in making room for these kids in his heart, they would leave such an aching hollow space when they weren’t there. That while he was still fantastically, radiantly happy, a piece of him would always be occupied with wishing they were home. It didn’t matter that Simon stood three inches taller than Harvey, that the laughter floating across the kitchen now came in a deep baritone. Walking into the house to the familiar scene, Charlie saw six-year-old Simon, accepting a dripping plate from his father and giggling at some shared joke.

He closed the door behind him and both men turned, smiling. “I wondered where you’d run off to, sunflower,” Harvey called. “Everything okay in the barn?”

“All good, darlin’, just wanted to make sure it was warm enough in there. Supposed to drop a few degrees tonight.” He crossed the kitchen, going up on tiptoe to kiss Harvey on the cheek; Simon rolled his eyes, but Charlie knew it was just a habit left over from his teen years. Men who were genuinely embarrassed by their parents’ affection didn’t travel thousands of miles to play a love song for their anniversary, after all. “Mind doing me a favor, Sy? I’m pretty worn out, but I forgot to check on the birds. Can you run out and make sure they’re all closed up for the night?”

“Sure, no problem. We’re almost done anyway.”

“I can take over,” Charlie said, holding out his hand for the towel. Simon handed it over, heading for the door and picking up his jacket on the way.

“If you’re too tired, I don’t mind finishing up,” Harvey said, nudging him with an elbow. The door closed behind them, and Charlie listened intently to the sound of Simon’s steps crossing the porch. “There’s only a few—”

“Not tired,” Charlie said in an urgent whisper, his eyes darting to Amelia; she looked fast asleep, her fingers curled into Beverly’s fur. Simon’s steps had crunched down onto the path toward the chicken coop. He tossed the towel onto the counter, seizing Harvey’s damp hand and tugging him toward the stairs. “Come on!”

“Char, what—”

“Shh! I’ll tell you upstairs.”

They crept up the stairs as quickly as they could without waking Amelia, Charlie towing Harvey after him into the study. Harvey reached for the light switch, but Charlie batted his hand away and barreled toward the window. When they reached it, he dropped into a crouch, pulling Harvey down with him.

“Charlie, what in the world is going on?”

“I didn’t forget to lock the coop,” Charlie whispered. “Lucia’s going to ask Simon out. I was helping her make a bouquet.”

Even in the semidarkness, the look of surprised delight on Harvey’s face was deeply gratifying. “Yoba,” he whispered back. “That’s—wow. Right now?”

“Right now. We can see them from here, look.” Charlie pointed down at the cherry tree, a short distance away but still clearly visible in the moonlight. Lucia stood underneath it, her hair blowing gently in the cool breeze and one hand tucked behind her back, and Charlie knew Simon would come around the corner any moment. He glanced at Harvey, who still wore that thunderstruck expression. “Unless you think we should give them their privacy,” he added in an undertone. Harvey flapped an impatient hand at him, not taking his eyes off the window.

“You know damn well neither one of us is going to go back downstairs and do dishes right now.”

Charlie snickered, bumping his shoulder against Harvey’s. They huddled together at the window sill, keeping as low as they could to avoid being seen. Simon came around the corner, hands in the pockets of his jacket, and Lucia straightened. Charlie could tell the exact moment when Simon saw her: his head came up, his gait slowed. When he was about six feet away, he stopped, giving a little wave. In the dark, Harvey’s hand found Charlie’s, gripping it tight. The feeling was mutual—Charlie was all but vibrating with excitement.

Lucia spoke. Between the distance and the closed window, Charlie couldn’t hear anything, but he could see her lips moving. She smiled, ducking her head; her hair fell across her face, and she made no effort to tuck it back. With her visible hand, she gestured between the two of them. Whatever she was saying, she’d apparently planned it, because the speech went on for some time. Certainly longer than Charlie’s bouquet-giving speech, which had consisted only of “Please go out with me, Harvey, you’d make me so happy.”

...Although, actually, what else had needed to be said? And it had worked, so never mind. It had been a perfect speech and Charlie was a genius.

“I wish we could see his face,” Harvey whispered. “Which expression do you think it is? The big surprised happy one, like when we got Beverly, or—you know, the—” Charlie turned to Harvey, widening his eyes and letting his mouth go just slightly slack in an imitation of their son’s shocked face, and Harvey laughed. “Yes, that’s the one,” he agreed. “Has to be.”

“Oh oh oh, there!” Charlie hissed, squeezing Harvey’s forearm, because Lucia had brought out the flowers. She fiddled with them for a moment, still talking, and then held them out to Simon; she waited, smiling, and both Charlie and Harvey held their breath.

Simon stepped forward, covering the hand that held the flowers with his own. With his other hand, he tucked her hair behind her ear; then, he tilted her chin up and kissed her.

Up in the study, Charlie pumped both fists into the air. Harvey let out a victorious whoop that he quickly choked off, casting a sheepish glance down the stairs to where Amelia slept. Charlie flung his arms around Harvey’s neck, and they rocked each other, silently sharing their excitement. Charlie genuinely wasn’t one of those parents who was desperate to marry off his kids, or see them “settled.” He wanted them to do their own thing in their own time, and just to be happy, whatever that meant for each of them. But Simon wasn’t the type to give his heart away without a second thought, and he so clearly loved Lucia. Charlie had spent six months growing equal parts happy for Simon and concerned that this Lucia person might be stringing him along, or maybe just not interested. He was thrilled to know that wasn’t the case.

When they broke apart, Simon and Lucia still stood under the cherry tree, embracing. Charlie decided it was time to actually give them some privacy. Without speaking, he and Harvey stood. They intertwined their fingers, leaving the darkened study and making their way quietly back down the stairs. Harvey went into the kitchen, propped the last few plates into the drying rack, and turned off the light above the sink; Charlie stepped into the living room, watching the firelight on Amelia’s sleeping face. After a moment, he pulled the blanket off the back of the couch, shaking it out and spreading it over her. Beverly lifted her head, blinking sleepily, and Charlie gave her a scratch between the ears.

“Don’t worry, good girl,” he murmured. “Go back to sleep.”

Beverly did. Charlie stroked a hand gently over Amelia’s hair, tugging the blanket a little higher, and then Harvey was beside him. They tiptoed together into the bedroom, closing the door carefully to keep from waking their daughter. Even with the solid door shut, neither of them said a word as they went about their routine and changed into their pajamas. Charlie knew, somehow, that they were both feeling the same curious blend of emotions: joy that Simon was happy and loved; the bittersweet knowledge that he was really, truly grown up. And of course, there was the layer of reminiscence for their own relationship, for those early days when everything had been exhilarating and new.

But watching Harvey pull back the covers and climb into bed—maybe moving just a little more slowly these days, but in better shape than ever thanks to farm work and yoga—he knew it would never stop being exhilarating. Familiarity had done nothing to dim the spark between them; it had built that spark into a roaring fire, comforting and bright. It had kept him warm and lit his way for twenty-six years, and it always would.

They fit themselves together in bed, Harvey’s head on Charlie’s chest, all four of their ankles tangled up. As Charlie stroked up and down Harvey’s spine, he searched for something meaningful to say. Something that would mark the occasion, and express his joy at having their family all under one roof again.

What came out instead was, “Jesus, their kids are going to be tall.”

Harvey shook the bed with his silent giggles, and Charlie joined in, burying his face in his husband’s silver hair to muffle his laughter. When they subsided, Harvey sighed, pulling back to meet his eye.

“Grandkids,” he said, in a tone of hushed delight. “I can’t wait.”

“You’re gonna have to. They just started dating. We can’t possibly be those parents, who harass them about having babies from day one.”

“Of course not,” Harvey said, nudging his ankle with his toes. “We would never. But it’s fun to think about.”

“Mm. It is.”

Harvey searched his face, and his smile softened. “You know,” he began, “I didn’t expect to be saying this at sixty-four, but I guess we still have some new adventures left.”

“Oh, yes, Number One,” Charlie murmured, leaning in to kiss him good night. “We’re just getting started.”

A few miscellaneous notes!

The title of this fic comes from a beautiful Shearwater song, You As You Were . Real, authorized explanations of the lyrics are hard to find, but I’ve always interpreted it as being about reinvention—hitting an impasse in your life and deciding to become someone new. Harvey, Charlie, Shane and Maru all go through that process in different ways in this story, so I thought it was a good fit.

I don't share my artwork publicly much, so thanks for indulging me a little! I doodled these guys a lot while I was writing, and thought it would be fun to color a few sketches to share here.

I always like seeing people’s interpretations of what the characters would look like in real life. Here are the pictures I have in my head!

Harvey: Lee Pace (during his time with a glorious mustache)

Shane: Liam Garrigan (during his role in The Terror)

Maru: a young Sade or Zadie Smith

Charlie: Charlie is so difficult! I haven’t been able to find anyone who matches the picture in my head exactly. The closest I can come is 90s baby Brad Pitt with this haircut (just a little darker).

Simon: A bit like Matthew Daddario , but even taller and with long hair

Amelia: Another tough one. Most like a slightly younger Zsané Jhé , but with longer hair too

Lucia: Somewhere between Liu Wen and a very young Cher , but, y’know, grunge