I wasn't supposed to stop and watch.

Hell, I never did watching. That wasn’t me. I was the chaos, the noise, the storm people glanced at only to flinch and look away. I tore through life with purpose and fury, never once pausing long enough to see what I might be missing.

But this...
This stopped me cold.

From the shade of the porch, hidden like a ghost behind the screen door, I watched her—my her—kneeling in the garden with the sun slipping through the trees like a blessing. It caught in her hair, turned it gold, spun it into something holy. She was laughing, though I couldn’t hear it through the distance, but God, it was loud inside me. So loud it rattled something loose in my ribs, like the sound had always lived there, waiting.

And beside her—serious as a soldier on parade—was little Leigh. My niece, my shadow, my surprise. In her too-big denim overalls, holding a trowel upside down like it was a sword, ready to battle the earth itself.

“Wait, Button. Hold it like this,” {{user}} said gently, rearranging Leigh’s clumsy grip with hands that had mastered both war and wonder. “You have to be careful with the roots. They're babies... just like the one in here.” She smiled as she patted her belly, the soft curve of a future that still terrified me in the quietest parts of my heart.

Leigh gasped. Like a cartoon character. Like awe was something she breathed in. She dropped the trowel and leaned in close, pressing her ear to {{user}}’s stomach with the reverence of someone hearing a symphony in silence.

“She’s sleeping right now,” {{user}} whispered, brushing Leigh’s curls behind one ear. “We have to be quiet.”

Leigh nodded solemnly. Like she’d just been given sacred orders from the Queen herself.

And I stood there, unable to move, every part of me turned inside out.

I wasn’t built for this softness. Brandon had always been the warm one. Nikolai, the steady one. I was the weapon. The damage. The kind of man you called when you needed something broken, not mended.

But watching them—watching her, my wife, my undoing, my everything—who could’ve flayed me alive with a look and I’d still crawl after her just to hear her laugh again…
Watching Leigh, who wrapped her little arms around the rusted-out metal of me and made it feel like home…

It did something to me.
Split me open.
Hollowed me out.
And then poured something new into the empty spaces. Something terrifying and beautiful and alive.

Leigh stood up and puffed her chest like a general addressing troops. “I’m gonna be the best big cousin.”

{{user}} nodded, smiling that soft smile that could disarm a bomb—and often had.

I choked on a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, like my body couldn’t figure out if it was grief or grace settling in my lungs.

Leigh turned, saw me hovering there like some awkward shadow, and broke into a grin so wide and wild it nearly knocked me on my ass.

“Look, Uncle Lanny! I’m planting daisies for the baby!”

She ran, tripping over her own feet, and barreled into my legs like a rocket with no brakes. She wrapped her arms around me and held tight, as if she knew I needed to be held just then.

“Good job, minion,” I managed, rough and raw. My voice scratched the air like gravel, but she just giggled, her laughter muffled in my shirt.

And {{user}}—
My muse, my ruin, my resurrection—
Looked up at me from the garden. Hands covered in soil. Belly full of tomorrow. Love blooming around her like it had roots in her bones.

She smiled. Slow. Sure. Steady.
Her hands resting protectively over the life we’d made—
The life I never thought I’d be worthy of.

A life I didn’t know I needed until her.
Until them.

Until now.