Three cars pulled up the drive in a line, headlights sweeping the front of the estate before cutting out one by one. Franz and Arianne stepped out of the first. Gilbert climbed out of the second, Julian out of the third, both of them having driven separately from the forum without needing to discuss why. A fourth car already sat parked near the entrance, one Arianne recognized before she’d finished closing her door.
"Nate’s here," she said.
"Early," Gilbert said, checking his watch out of habit rather than need. "He said he had something to sort before dinner. Didn’t say what."
Franz didn’t answer that. He was already halfway up the front steps.
The front door opened onto noise before it opened onto anything else. Toys covered half the sitting room floor, the good rug buried under blocks and a half-built track for a toy train. Kyle was directing traffic from the center of it, and Lily was correcting his directions from the edge. Nate sat cross-legged on the floor with Lexx propped against his knee, holding the baby’s hands and moving them in some rhythm only the two of them understood. Lexx was squealing, high and delighted, loud enough that nobody in the room had heard the front door.
Aunt Estella’s voice carried from the kitchen, low and running under the sound of something simmering, dinner well underway without needing to be checked on. She’d handed Lexx off the second Nate walked in, by his own account, and hadn’t looked back since.
"He’s never done that for me," Julian said, dropping his bag by the stairs.
"He’s never done that for anyone," Gilbert said, crouching down to intercept a rolling block before Kyle could trip over it. "Lucky first try."
"It’s not luck. Lexx likes him better than he likes me. He cries every single time I hold him." Julian said it with the particular grievance of someone who’d counted the incidents. "Gilbert gets nothing. Nate gets a standing ovation. I get sobbing."
"You’re a nice uncle anyway." Lily didn’t look up from the train track. "He can probably tell you’re nervous. Babies do that. It’s not personal."
"I am not nervous."
"You’re a little nervous," Lily said, with the flat certainty of someone reading a fact off a page. "It’s fine. Leo used to be nervous around Kyle’s hamster."
Leo, on the far side of the rug, nodded once without looking up from the block tower he was building. He’d stopped being afraid of the hamster months ago, but Lily kept the story in rotation anyway, pulling it out whenever an argument needed backup.
Arianne went upstairs before anyone could ask her opinion on the matter. She changed out of the blazer and heels into something with no structure to hold, scrubbed the day off her face, and came back down to find Nate on the floor exactly as she’d left him, Lexx now gnawing on one of his own fingers with intense concentration.
"He’s had two solid hours of this," Nate said, handing him up without being asked. "Fair warning."
Lexx twisted in her arms the second she had him, found her face, and broke into the kind of smile that had no strategy behind it at all. He started babbling immediately, a string of sounds aimed at nobody but delivered with total conviction.
"Hi," she told him. He babbled back, louder.
Franz appeared at the bottom of the stairs long enough to kiss the top of Lexx’s head, say something to Nate that made him nod once, and disappear back up before dinner. Nobody asked where. Nobody needed to. He’d been doing a version of this since the car ride home, present in short stretches and then gone, and Arianne let it be his to manage in whatever order he needed.
The adults settled into the sitting room to wait out the last stretch before dinner, Kyle and the twins reabsorbed into the train track dispute.
"How was the forum?" Lily asked, apropos of nothing, the way she asked most of her important questions.
"Tiring," Gilbert said.
"Boring," Julian said. "You might want to rethink the CEO plan, kid. It’s mostly people talking at you about interest rates."
"I’m not rethinking it." Lily said it without heat, the way she said most things she’d already decided. "I’ll ask Arianne to teach me when I’m older. Interest rates are just math with extra steps."
"That’s the spirit," Gilbert said.
Dinner arrived in courses that nobody at the small end of the table ate in order. Kyle and Lily had gotten into a dispute over dessert before the main course was cleared, Kyle insisting on custard, Lily insisting chocolate cake was objectively correct.
"Chocolate is better," Lily said.
"Custard doesn’t fall apart when you poke it," Kyle said, and considered that the stronger argument.
Franz cut in before it could escalate past the table. "There’s no better one. You both got what you asked for. Eat it and enjoy it. That’s the whole rule."
Neither child looked satisfied, but both ate their cake, which Franz counted as a win close enough to a real one. Lily ate hers in identical bites, evenly spaced, pausing once to note that hers was gone last, which she said proved patience worked. Kyle finished his in three and declared the argument over by virtue of speed.
Kyle was staying over again, the arrangement worn in enough by now that none of the three children needed instructions. They filed upstairs together for the bath-and-pajamas routine they’d built between themselves, leaving Lexx behind with the adults, already heavy-eyed from a full day spent being passed between laps.
He took his bottle without much fight and was asleep within minutes of finishing it, worn through in a way only a six-month-old could manage after two hours on someone else’s floor. Arianne laid him down in the bassinet in the corner of the sitting room rather than carry him upstairs, and for the first time since the car pulled up the drive, the house went calm enough to talk.