Author's Note: So apparently this will be a three-parter? Which wasn't planned, but then again, none of this story was. I didn't even plan on finishing it, especially after the new season started and invalidated a huge plot point in this story, but then again this story went off the canon rails a while ago, so I figured, why not just keep going.

I.

I have to get out of here, because after Dad got done yelling at us I still feel like I'm waiting for him to come back and yell again. So I kick my feet off Maia's bed and head to the bathroom, but she's too busy leaning over her homework to notice. She's moved on to science now – the sun and the moon, planets and galaxies, comets and gravity and black holes. The study of the whole universe, like anybody can actually know that.

Maia's bathroom is the best room in the house. It's blue – blue rugs, blue shower curtain, blue towels and makes you feel calm just by sitting there. It smells like brand new soap and sometimes I just sit there and smell it, the spiciness of clean.

Like now. I sit on the toilet lid and look at the blue and it's like being underwater, like swimming. Dad's footsteps aren't on the stairs and Maia is still doing homework, I'm math-tarded and don't give a shit. Who gives a fuckwad about slope, anyway. But Maia loves it. She says it's like planning, making lists, working your way back to square one.

She's weird like that. Always has to do things so perfectly. When we were in seventh grade, we had to make graphs for lab reports and Maia would seriously use half the pad of graph paper trying to make hers perfect – no crooked lines, no eraser smudges, no slanted handwriting. Then she'd get frustrated and start crying, and get mad at me when I told her she was being stupid and it didn't matter if it was perfect, our teacher was the middle school assistant football coach and didn't care about grades and just gave everybody eighties because he didn't want to read the entire lab report. I know that because once I wrote the song lyrics to one of my dad's songs in the middle of a paper about kinetic energy, and he still gave me an eighty-seven.

But still, she'd have to do them. Over and over and over again, until she thought they were perfect. Even though she always had the highest grade in class, and one bad grade wouldn't hurt.

I get it, though. Even when we were little and grades didn't matter, it's always been like this. It's because of her mom, even if she's never said it and gets really pissed at me when I tell her.

Her mom was really young when she got pregnant. Younger than our teachers. When I Googled her, it said she was nineteen when she got married, twenty when she had Maia, and twenty-one when she died.

That's only six years older than I am now. Even Daphne's older than that.

I try to imagine me, six years from now. Being married, having a kid. Being dead. I can't, but I looked at a lot of photos of Maia's mom and think she looks like Maia, except with darker hair. She's pretty. For some reason, she looks like somebody we would know; like someone's older sister we've known our whole lives. She didn't look like a mom, though; she looked like us, like she was our age. Except she wasn't, because she'd had sex and was married and going on tour with my mom.

There's a lot of stuff on the internet of Maia's mom – some music videos and interviews, but mostly clips from that TV show she had with Maia's dad. The show is kind of really famous, even if it only lasted one season before everybody found out her dad was gay. Apparently it was really popular when it was airing, but after everything that happened with her dad, it became even more famous. And then, after the crash that killed her mom, it really blew up. Now everybody's seen it, or at least knows about it. Including all the fucking morons we go to school with.

Maia HATES that show. Hates it hates it hates it. She refuses to watch it, even the parts that don't make her parents look incredibly stupid. She says it's not them at all. I wonder how she knows that, given that her dad's not around and her mom died when she was too little to remember, but Maia says she's never seen anything from that show and never will.

It really is a stupid show, the kind that's only funny if you forget that the people you're laughing are real and have feelings. And I always feel bad doing it, because these aren't the usual reality TV morons who you can tell are too stupid to do anything else with their lives and just want to do anything to get famous.

These are my best friend's parents. And I feel like, whenever I laugh at some dumb thing her mom says or how stupid her dad looks, or think that the whole idea of her parents having a reality show is the worst idea in the world, I feel like I'm insulting Maia.

Besides, Maia never laughs or makes fun of me for the shit people say about my mom and dad. She's the only person who thinks it's all total shit.

In the season finale, Maia's mom finds out she's pregnant with her. She has the stick she had to pee on, and the camera zooms in, and we see two lines appear in blue. I don't think any of this idiotic crap is actually like real life, but that scene is different. She actually cries when she finds out, but it's so obvious they're the good tears. The happiness in her mom's eyes is so real, it makes my head hurt.

I can't imagine what Maia would feel, seeing that.

The scene after that is one with just her dad, being interviewed.

"It's a surprise," he admits, laughing and scratching the back of his head. All I can think of whenever I see that moment is, holy crap, that's the same look Maia gets.

"But of course I'm excited," he says, and he smiles into the camera. "I never expected things to go this way, but I definitely believe everything turns out the way it's supposed to. And we're supposed to be parents now."

He shakes his head, like he can't quite believe he's saying that.

"And I can't wait," he says. His voice drops to almost a whisper. "Being a dad is going to totally change my life. And I can't wait to meet the person that's gonna do that."

He laughs.

"I'm ready. I'm excited. I'm happy." He grins into the camera, and the look on his face reminds me of Maia again. I can't decide whether she looks more like her mom or her dad; whenever I see a picture of either one of them, it's like her face is warring to decide which one she takes after more.

"And I'm completely scared shitless."

They don't say the "shitless" part, of course. They bleep it out. But you know it's there.

The next scene after that is with Maia's parents lying on the couch together, with their arms wrapped around each other in ways I only see people do in sappy movies. Her mom's laughing, and her dad pushed back her mom's t-shirt to show the camera her stomach. It's so pale and bare you can't imagine that there's a baby in there, but Maia's inside. He kisses her stomach, the place where Maia's growing, and runs his hand over it. Like he's really touching her, or already trying.

I never know what to do about the whole "gay" thing, with her dad. People at school always call each other "faggot" and "gaytard", and it doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean. A few people still call Maia "Lesbo Lexington", even though she's been going by her mom's name her whole life. Maia swears it doesn't matter to her, people can think whatever they want, but I know it gets to her. It bothers her more when people say shit about her dad than her, though. Once, when we were in sixth grade, someone wrote "DYKE" on her social studies binder in red Sharpie. She threw it out and didn't tell the teacher. But she's been in trouble before for hitting people, guys like Keean Thompson and Jake Bradshaw and Aiden Wells, who have been giving Maia shit our whole lives and said she was probably a lesbo dyke, too, just like her "fucking fairy dad".

But Maia doesn't act like it's weird. She talks to her dad's, like, partner, or whatever, all the time. His name's Nate. They've been together a long time. She says he's really nice.

They met in a dentist's waiting room. She swears it's not as weird as it sounds.

She's been attached to her phone all day, waiting for him to text her about the thing in Atlanta. She texts with her dad a lot, too, but talks to Nate more. When I asked her why, she says that Nate just gets her a lot better. It's easier to talk to him.

Personally, I think someone that gay-marries a girl and then dumps her when she's pregnant with his kid owes Maia a lot more than some text messages. That's just me. But I learned a long time ago it's best to shut the fuck up when it comes to Maia's dad.

Besides today, the last time my dad and I were in the same room as each other was the night he moved out. They were screaming at each other, and it was like they forgot Keller and I were in the same house as them and could hear everything they were saying.

"I can't be around you right now. Just let me get out of here without starting another round of this."

"Fine! I don't have to pretend to care about your feelings!"

The door slammed, and Dad's car spun out of the driveway. Keller was looking at me like I was supposed to tell him what to do, which freaked me out more than anything else.

Mom stood in the doorway, her feet bare. She stared at where Dad had just been standing like he was still there. Then she turned and went into the bedroom, not shutting the door behind her.

Keller was still staring at me like he expected me to fix this, and that kept freaking me out.

"Maybe you should go to bed," I told him, after staring at Mom's closed bedroom door.

"I'm hungry," Keller said.

"Then go get something to eat."

"I don't want anything here."

Then he started crying, and it made me so pissed off to see that, because why was he crying?

"What do you want me to do?" I snapped. "Make something?"

He kept crying, so I yelled at him to shut up. Then he ran into the bonus room and cried on the couch, like a baby.

Mom's door was still shut and Keller was still acting stupid, so I went to the kitchen to see if some food really would shut him up. But there was nothing in the house except cereal, and it wasn't even the kind anybody liked to eat.

Dad did all the grocery shopping. And it looked like he hadn't in a while.

Keller wasn't crying when I went back upstairs, so I went into the den and turned on TV. There was nothing on except this movie Maia really likes, and I thought Maia would want to watch it with me over the phone so I thought I'd call her, but then she'd ask why I was calling her so late, and I didn't want to tell her that it looked like my dad moved out and didn't say goodbye to us, and Mom was locking the door and Keller was crying, and I didn't know when I'd see Dad again.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table the next morning, with a red and white face. She had a cup of coffee in her hands that she wasn't drinking, and when Keller and I came into the kitchen in the morning she blinked at us like she couldn't remember who we were.

"Mom," Keller said. "We have to go to school."

Mom kept blinking at us.

Deacon had to take us to school that morning. Keller forgot his lunch, and we were already at school when he realized that, so he started crying and I yelled at him to shut up and stop being a baby, and all I could think of was how much I wanted to scream at Dad. Not just because he left, but because I already knew. The Thing I Wasn't Supposed To Know.

I wanted to scream it right in his face. Like it was his fault. And it scared me because I didn't know how he would look at me if he found out I knew.

My ears still hurt.

I want to pull them but it'll just hurt worse. It's quiet in here. I want to be in the water. I feel twitchy and restless if I don't get in the pool at least once a day. I have to swim every day, because then I'm too tired to feel like I'm twitching and humming and itching with the things that keep replaying over and over again, the shit I wish I didn't have to know.

I don't want to go home. I want Paw Paw Glenn to still be here. I don't want to listen to the reporters or the people at school or the grocery store headlines.

I want it all to stop, stop, stop.

II.

Around the third or fourth drink, Maddie ditches her guitar for Avery's piano in the corner, one that was slightly out of tune. But Maddie's fingers are jumping from key to key without her usual finesse, so it hardly matters that no one had played this piano in a few months.

Deacon taught himself to play the piano, as did Gunnar. Only Avery had formal lessons as a kid, playing in recitals and everything.

She used to beg him to play for her. His favorite composer was Chopin – Juliette had pronounced it "Chop-In" in her head, and when she heard that it was actually pronounced "Show-PAN", she was grateful she never gave Avery the opportunity to correct her on it. She had some of his compositions downloaded on her iPod; it used to be her pre-show warm-up music, to shut everything out.

He played once at a summer picnic once. They were all goofing around, singing old songs and passing guitars around, and Avery ended up plunked down on Scarlett's keyboard. He started playing, and all of a sudden everybody stopped – even Clay, who was a few months old back then and sat drooling, mesmerized, in Scarlett's lap.

"I had no idea you could play like that," Deacon said, when it was over. It took a minute after the music stopped for anyone to talk, and hearing his words felt like surfacing after holding your breath under the water. "And I've known you for how long?"

Avery shrugged.

"I'll tell my mother the great Deacon Claybourne just complimented her piano lessons," he said with a slight smile. "She'll be thrilled."

She wondered why he didn't play anymore. Or maybe he just didn't play for her.

Maddie is still plinking out a manic little melody. Her phone is on the coffee table – two missed calls from Harrison – and Juliette figures she's not the only one avoiding going home.

She doesn't see what she has to look forward to, being there. Padding through the home at night, Avery gone and the boys asleep. It's a relatively new house – they only moved in two years ago – but it's funny how the walls always feel etched with the same words, the same echoes:

do you deserve this? Do you deserve this bed? This life? These people you think love you?

The worst confession – sometimes, she thought, maybe.

Like when the boys were small and noisy, filled with sweat and energy and sticky hands. Sometimes they'd wake her and Avery up at five in the morning; sometimes they'd spill orange juice on her clothes and she'd snap at them; sometimes she'd be stuck cleaning barf out of the carpets and doing laundry when they got sick in the middle of the night. When they were really small, Avery would keep them backstage during her shows, wearing noise-cancelling headphones that looked comically huge on their round baby heads. The walls to their bedrooms were painted with smiling airplanes and dinosaurs, and even the clouds had a little grin to them. They dealt with Finn's pathological fear of dogs, the way Keller sucked his thumb until he was almost seven.

She signed away her rights to her own life at fifteen, writing her name on that Edgehill contract. The right to her own privacy, her own secrets, the context to every word that came out of her mouth. The price of fame, everyone told her. The price – sitting in the laps of men who patted her head and told her she was a "pretty little thing", and never asked, just took. Tabloids following her car. People accosting her in the grocery store. Snapping flashbulbs in her face when she had a baby in her arms – no wonder Finn had been so afraid of dogs, they must have reminded him of the paparazzi chasing them down the street when he was a baby, their voices like barks as they yelled and snapped their photos and tried to get the best shot of Juliette Barnes screwing up her entire life again, while Avery tried to cover their son with a blanket so no one could sell his face, his fear, to the highest bidder.

And that was after the cheating scandal. The picketing, the riots, the album burnings; the protests of her concerts and the people throwing paint on her.

An album at the top of the country charts less than two years later helped. A little. Just not as much as the price of fame.

And then hearing everybody tell her – honey, this is how it is. Get used to it.

Once she caught a reporter sneaking around backstage, posing as a stage hand. He was trying to talk to Finn, who was four and playing with his train set. Avery called the cops; Deacon literally threw him out the door. Juliette yelled at Finn about talking to strangers; he ran to Avery and cried, hugging his daddy's waist. She demanded more security, fired the people she had. When Keller was born, a nurse had sold a photo of her newborn son to Us Weekly. She'd been fired when the hospital found out, and they'd taken the magazine to court, barring them from publishing any photos of her children.

The last contract she'd signed her name on, she'd made sure to read the fine print. All the restraints and clauses, the rules and by-laws, the headnotes and footnotes and every phrase drafted, right down the last semi-colon. She and Avery had signed on the dotted line only after both their lawyers had triple-checked it.

None of them would ever speak of this to any of the press. Avery's name would be on the birth certificate, as it had been when it was filed three days ago. There would be no discussions of blood tests, child support, or paternity claims. Then the three of them signed on the dotted lines, and that was the last she and Avery ever saw or heard from Jeff Fordham.

He signed the contract with a fountain pen that Juliette figured cost more than her double-wide growing up. Hesitated the briefest second – just a second.

He stopped just a moment, and turned back to them. A hand ran through his hair, and he stared at the tabletop, looking almost sheepish. Like something might be weighing on him.

"I have epilepsy," he said, finally.

Juliette stared at the ground. She could see the marks, where her fingernails dug into the skin. If he would just sign the fucking paper, already.

Jeff sighed, staring at his shoes.

The silence was about to choke them all, so Avery finally made his throat unstick.

"Really."

Jeff nodded, but didn't look at them.

"I haven't had a problem since I was in college, but I take medication for it and everything." He cleared his throat. "My dad had it, too. It runs in families. Just…something to keep in mind."

He'd signed the contract.

What contract did she sign that gave the world the right to tear her life apart?

Which contract made her Juliette Barnes?

Which version – trailer trash, superstar, cheater, mother, pariah, wife, shame, lover?

Maddie was still plinking away. The girl Juliette had known since she was twelve, a soaring superstar who could go anywhere she wanted, soar higher than anyone Juliette knew. Juliette Barnes may have crashed and burned too many times to count, but she'd never wanted to watch this girl do the same. She'd never wanted to take her down, only watch her fly.

The price of fame was Juliette Barnes being public property. She'd tried not to let it happen to her kids, but like everyone said – honey, this is how it is. Get used to it. Nothing in her life was safe or sacred, including her boys. She was created by other people to be exactly what they wanted her to be, and that may or may not include someone who was looking out for her children the same way she'd needed someone to look out for her, once upon a time.

She'd tried to do the same for Maddie, even as the girl grew into the young woman who sat, slightly drunk, at her husband's piano. Tried to be there for a girl who needed someone when she felt like there was no one else, and Juliette knew too well what that aching felt like; the need and loneliness and fear, and the feeling that no one heard, or cared. Her own eyes used to be so full of it, and she's looked for it in the eyes of her own boys every single day of their lives.

Juliette doesn't think she's ever seen it, but then again, maybe she's just lying to herself. Like the way her own mama used to lie to her, filling her with those empty promises.

Maddie looks up from the keys, at Juliette staring off into space. Then she turns back to the keys, and starts playing the only piece Juliette knows, something she thinks is Beethoven but doesn't want to ask. The girl looks like Deacon when she plays, and sometimes Finn looks at her with an expression in his eyes she wishes she didn't have to see. Juliette looks at Maddie, and still sees the thirteen-year-old girl who sat by the hospital bed of her comatose mother, blaming herself for the destruction all around her.

Seeing Jeff's name on that contract years ago, Juliette still wondered if she'd proved herself right. That she didn't deserve this. Just like Jeff had told her.

She shoves herself off the couch, nearly trips over the rug and her own feet. When she starts thinking about this kind of crap, it's time to get good and drunk. Or, she supposes, in her case, good and drunker.

III.

I'm pretty sure Coach is going to pop quiz us on this chapter tomorrow – he usually does that so he doesn't actually have to teach, just sit there at the desk and Google fantasy scores – so I'm trying to not skip every other line on this chapter. Still, I'm halfway down the page when I realize I've highlighted almost every word. I'm in the middle of highlighting a sentence about micrometeorites, which are tiny particles of meteors that rain down to earth and cover us. We can't see them, and they tend to mingle with dust and pollen and dandruff, so we don't even realize that we're getting showered in little bits of the unknown.

Finn's still in the bathroom, doing God knows what. He's already pissed that Avery made him miss swim practice because of his ear. He's as religious about swimming as I am about school, so I don't really blame him for being in a bad mood, but I have my history paper to write, and I can't do his homework on top of my own all the time.

Except I have before. And will probably do it again.

Just not tonight. I think.

He'd do the same for me, which is anything.

It's been this way our whole lives. I can't remember a time when it wasn't "Finn and Maia", or "Maia and Finn". Against the world, because the world was against us.

It's not like we planned on that happening – it's just what happens when the world thinks they know all your family's dirty business, and feels like they're allowed to say and do and judge whatever they want, because they think they have any idea what it's like to be a member of your family.

By now, everybody knows about Finn's mom's big scandals, and anybody can watch my parents' reality show streaming online at the touch of a button. They see these people and think they know them. They think they know us.

By the time we hit third grade, everybody assumed my name was "Lesbo Lexington", and people were quoting bits from that horrible show to me, some of the things my mom said that became big catch phrases when the show became really popular. And while people just made fun of my mom for looking like an idiot on TV, everybody remembered who my dad really was. Some enterprising seventh graders started calling me a rugmuncher when they passed me in the halls. I had some random person leave a note in my locker asking me if I did threesomes. Parents wouldn't let their kids hang out with me. Boys told me they'd never kiss a bulldyke, and anyway, nobody would ever want me because I didn't have tits. Girls called me "butch" when I wore pants; "lipstick lesbian" on the dress-up days when we were forced to wear dresses and skirts.

Meanwhile, Finn's mom was showing up in the tabloids, and reporters were camping out on his lawn.

It wasn't like either of us were ever popular, but we were always quietly uninvited to birthday parties and ostracized in the lunch room.

Basically, we've always known that it's just us. And by now, we're way beyond needing anything from anybody else.

Sometimes, though I remember the days before we knew that. Like the days when Finn and I were little, we used to play this game called "Steeplechase". We'd run around in empty concert halls and stadiums and amphitheaters while his mom and dad – or Rayna and Deacon – did their soundcheck, and we'd grab the backs of the seats and jump over them. We'd always end up at separate ends of the venue, but by the end we'd always jump back together. No matter how long it took us, we'd always meet in the middle.

Then there were the nights when my father would show up.

It was always after I was asleep, so at first I was never sure if he was really there or if I just imagined he was back. And then I'd smell him – soap and leather, like detergent and toothpaste, like the road after it rains. I think I can remember the nights he'd show up and come straight to my bedroom, when he'd wake me up just to tuck me back in.

Back then he felt like the sky, buffering the clouds along in it. He'd lie down next to me and wrap me up in my arms and kiss my hair, and ask me to tell him what's going on. And I'd tell him everything, and when I couldn't figure out anything else to tell him I'd make stuff up, just so he'd stay there next to me and make me feel like I was as real as he was, smelling like the road and listening to him call me "the prettiest little lady in all of Nashville".

I'd talk until my throat was hoarse and I was so tired my eyes felt stuffed with sand. And he'd stay there, and I could bury my head into his shoulder, and he'd lie still and just hold onto me.

Before I fell asleep, he'd kiss my forehead and squeeze me tight, saying, "you are the only girl in the whole wide world for me."

On those nights, Gunnar would look at my dad with that face he gets when he wants to say something but can't. Usually it's one that he saves just for my dad, and just for the nights he'd show up to see me.

He hasn't done that in a long time, but I can see my dad's face in shadows, sometimes. Still feel his arms holding me, smell how solid he feels, and even though I didn't know her I can see why my mother fell in love with him. When Will Lexington says that he loves you, it feels like standing right in the sun. He's so real, and solid, and back then I'd believe anything he ever told me.

Like how he would be there in the morning, or how he'd stay the night. How he'd be there if I needed him. How bad dreams weren't real, and nothing could hurt me. How I was safe.

I don't know my mom, but maybe I'm just like her. Because I always wanted to trust him so badly. But I'm not sure that's the kind of thing I'd want to compare notes on, if I'd known her.

My dad never talks about my mom. I never do, either, with him. It never seemed weird that I didn't bring her up, because it wasn't like I had a whole lot of memories to talk about and he never even said her name. Besides, whenever he was around, I wanted all of his attention to be on me.

And even now, we still don't. Talk about her. I'm not sure how either of us would even know how.

Deacon sold his old house years ago, so I haven't seen the room where I lived with my mom the first year of my life since I was in elementary school. When I went to his house back then, I used to see the indents on the carpet where her bed used to be, and my crib. The walls were painted over, so you couldn't see what it looked like in the pictures I saw: the pale yellow color they'd been when I was born, stenciled with red flowers. In the last years he owned the house it was used as a storage room for his guitar collection, and the door was kept closed all the time. Apart from some of Maddie's things that were strewn all around the house, there was no evidence anyone but Deacon lived there. Definitely no trace that a baby had spent her first year of life inside these walls, learning to walk on the wooden floors.

I don't know what would happen if I saw it now. What it would do. It's like bringing up my mom with my dad. I wouldn't know what to do with any of it. I'm not sure what I'd say or think, or how it would change anything. If it even would.

I'm not sure I'd want to compare myself to her, anyway. What would I want to know about her? If she liked strawberry or grape jelly? What was her favorite song? Did she want a boy instead?

Why'd she keep me, after everything my dad put her through?

I finish skimming another page of science notes, looking to flesh out the outline for my paper. An orange highlighter bisects the textbook that's heavier than my head. Orange lines streak the glossy pages. Finn's still not back yet, his math homework abandoned. I try to go back to studying black holes, quasars and white dwarves; matter and anti-matter. Dark energy, the unexplained energy that permeates all of space and causes the universe to expand at a greater rate. It's unexplained, and it's pulling the whole universe farther and farther apart.

We haven't talked a lot about Avery moving out, or Dad not inviting me to his thing with Nate. It's like back in third grade when all the shit started hitting the fan, except now there's all this silence.

It never used to be quiet. Not with us, not like this.

IV.

Avery is still working on the same three lines of what's supposed to be the chorus when Gunnar cuts him off.

"It's not gonna get done if you try and force it," he says.

"Easy to say when you're not on a deadline," Avery replies.

"Dude, you've been playing the same three lines for forty minutes now. I can tell when you're forcing something that isn't gonna happen."

Avery scowls. "If it's bothering you so much, I can always leave."

But both of them know that's not going to happen, so Gunnar tries to tune out the same chord rhythm and focuses instead on watching the ravioli simmering on the stovetop.

From the living room, the Christmas tree lights go on automatically, and he catches their colorful glow out of the corner of his eyes. Gracie and Scarlett are both allergic to the real deal, so they had to buy one of those fake plastic ones from Walmart, but it really doesn't look half-bad. A little bent in places, the branches a little gnarled, but it came pre-lit so he doesn't have to fuss with the lights, and it only takes ten minutes to pop up and set out of the box every year, so he can't really complain.

When the kids were younger, he and Scarlett used to go all-out for the holidays. Neither of them had ever had much growing up, so occasions were a really big deal to them, especially the major ones like birthdays and Christmas. They always bounced from house to house, spending Christmas Eves with Avery and Juliette and Christmas Days with Deacon and Rayna, and more often than not Maddie and Daphne would come by and see the kids. Scarlett would spend days cooking and Juliette would somehow manage to snag the best caterers in town for a Christmas feast. On Christmas Day they had a rule where the kids were not allowed to come downstairs before 8 AM, although he and Scarlett could always hear their excited whispers and little feet running to the edge of the stairs, hear their gasping and squealing and anticipation.

He wonders what Christmas will be like this year. They won't be sharing it with Avery and Juliette, that's for sure. And Deacon and Rayna are thinking about taking off for the holidays, maybe going to his cabin for a quiet retreat, or someplace else nice and solitary.

Back around Halloween, he'd asked Micah if he wanted to bring his family to Nashville for the holidays – Gunnar would pay for the trip – but he'd declined. His girlfriend's entire family was flying down from Michigan to visit them in St. Louis, and they were going to spend New Year's with some old friends of theirs, so traveling out of state wasn't an option.

He'd texted Will and asked if he was planning on seeing Maia on for the holidays, but never heard back. Which, all in total, doesn't really surprise Gunnar. When Maia was younger she used to talk about how her dad would show up for Christmas, but then he wouldn't and she'd be crushed and spend the whole day trying not to act like it.

The worst was when he would promise her, and then still break her heart.

He wasn't sure how the subject of Christmas would be this year. Especially with Will and Nate's whole ceremony thing. She'd act like it didn't matter that her dad didn't ask her to be there, even though they both knew it did.

Maybe by now, Gunnar and Maia both should have gotten over the idea that they should expect anything from Will, given that he had never really been a part of her life. Gunnar didn't doubt that Will loved Maia. But love didn't always win the day. And he'd spent plenty of those rocking a fussy infant, or staying awake with the little girl because she had a fever, or moving aside in the bed so she could crawl between him and Scarlett, to know what real parenting was about.

"Gunnar."

He looks up, realizing he'd been spacing off and staring out the window. Music is playing from upstairs he doesn't remember hearing before, and outside the sky is creeping with twilight.

"Gunnar!"

He looks over at Avery, who had stopped strumming the same three notes on his guitar. He's pointing toward the stovetop.

"Your water's boiling," Avery says, and Gunnar turned around to see the pot on the stovetop bubbling over, the burner hissing as he rushed to turn the water down.

"Shit," he mumbles under his breath. "Sorry."

"You okay?" Avery asks. "You kinda spaced out for a minute."

"Yeah," Gunnar says, trying to contain the rest of the water before it spills over. "Yeah, fine."

"You want help?" Avery asks.

"No." He turns down the water and stirs the ravioli. "It's fine. I got it."

A phone rings, and Avery pulls his cell out of his pocket. Gunnar watches his face tighten and then freeze, and then Avery answers the phone with his eyes closed.

"Hey, bud," he says, and his voice is like hearing a pin drop. So quiet you can't even hear yourself breathing; like you're holding it to brace yourself before something big and unknown. "Yeah, I'll be there soon. You got all your homework done?"

They'd sent Maia to Space Camp down in Huntsville when she was younger, at the Space & Rocket Center. She loved it. Everything Gunnar knew about science he could quote from Armageddon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he'd put up with Maia's scornful face whenever he mentioned that to hear her talk about space. She talked about it the way Scarlett sang, or Will used to play in front of a crowd of twenty at an A.M. show or a sold-out one at the Bridgestone – like it was the purpose of the whole world, spinning their entire orbits, making them the most real versions of themselves.

Even if he knew nothing about all the science, it had inspired him to buy her a set of those glow-in-the-dark stars, the kind you pasted right above your bed. Jason had bought these for Gunnar when he was a kid, but neither of them knew anything about exoplanets and neutron stars or quasars, any of the things Maia ran on and on about while they glued the little plastic shapes to her bedroom ceiling, forming a galaxy that would glow above her head in the darkness.

"A long time ago," Gunnar mused to himself, as he pasted another star. He grinned at Maia. "In a galaxy far, far away…"

Maia had looked at him blankly.

"It's from a movie," he supplied, scratching behind his head. Shit, was he really this old? Had he already become one of those dorky sitcom dads?

Maia rolled her eyes.

"There's so much going on in this galaxy. I don't have time to think about what's going on anywhere else."

Gunnar tried not to smile.

"Sounds like a plan," he said.

She turned to look at him, hands on her hips, and she looked so serious and ferocious that it made him stop and look at her, biting her lip in this way that made her look way too much like her mother.

Will's intensity, Layla's eyes. It shook Gunnar, whenever he saw that.

"It is," she insisted, jabbing her chin at him. Then she looked up at the ceiling, gesturing at the hunks of little plastic, their jagged edges and the way that without moonlight, they just looked cheap and sad and easily forgotten. "Cause there's all this stuff that's so big out there, and they look so small but really they're bigger than us, and we're the small things."

She blinked at him.

"We're so small," she said, her voice hushed, ragged. "And all these things go on, and we don't know about it, and we probably never will, because it's all too big. And then there's all this other stuff that goes on that doesn't matter but we have to think about it anyway and pretend like we care about them."

She looked up at the space above her bed, the paltry, glued-together galaxy.

"All that stuff, it makes me feel like my head's hurting," she said, her voice still whispery.

She stared at Gunnar, and it took him a second to realize she was expecting an answer.

"I didn't know," he said, his voice quiet, and that was all he could manage. What else could he say to that?

He fixed some of the members of her little constellation that were coming loose from their glue, and Maia kept talking – about how when they looked through telescopes, what they were seeing was really a tiny, tiny, too-too-tiny little piece of the universe, barely a pinprick in a hole in a part of the sky where before we never thought there was anything at all. That in that tiny speck there were tens of thousands of other galaxies, tens of thousands so far away from us that what we see is this single glimpse of them, an image as they were at the very start of everything.

At some point she'd started to cry, and Gunnar didn't know why. So he just her into his arms and ran his hand over her hair, listening to her talk about how in Huntsville, the sky was so big and clear and the stars were so bright, and she could see the smear of the Milky Way in the midst of all the nothing and everything above her.

Maia didn't have those stars in her bedroom anymore; she'd left them behind when they moved, and she'd never replaced them in the new house.

Gunnar wondered if she remembered them, or that day she'd tried to explain the sky and failed. He used to forget about them, and then he'd go to tuck her into bed and look up and suddenly, brilliantly, there they'd be, a shorted formation barely glowing in the dimness.

It didn't hit him them – it took a few years, mostly after Clay was born. He'd be up with the baby, relieving Scarlett from the late-late shift, and he'd be changing a diaper or warming a bottle or just walking the living room with a fussy infant, and out of nowhere he'd think about his brother, and what he would have to say about Gunnar now. Married, kids, house in the burbs; a career and albums and awards and prestige and everything he ever wanted, everything Jason should have and never would and it wasn't fair and it still hurt.

Jason gave up his chance to raise Gunnar. Gunnar gave up a lot of chances for Maia, but they'd never felt like a surrender, or a loss. And then more sacrifices for Gracie and Clay. But he still made it. He had Scarlett. He had his kids. Jason was dead and Layla was dead and Will's chance at superstardom was gone, but he'd made it.

He still wondered what his big brother would have to say to him about all of this.

You got it made, little bro, Gunnar liked to imagine. Or maybe he'd just say something like, hey shithead, you owe me a fuckin' life!

At least there was Micah. It didn't exactly comfort him to know that his first love had cheated on him with the brother he'd adored, but if there was ever a definition of a silver lining, it was his nephew. He saw Micah a few times a year, usually around major holidays, and while he and Kiley didn't speak much anymore, he and Micah were still close. The boy could have gone a hundred different ways growing up, but he stayed out of trouble, stayed clean, and was the first member of either one of his family trees to actually go to college. Now he was living in St. Louis with his girlfriend and their son, who had just turned two a few weeks ago. Gunnar had flown out to St. Louis to visit them when the baby was born, and it blew him away to hold the infant and realize this should have been Jason's grandson.

Was Jason's grandson, either way.

It was one hell of a sentence to turn over in his mind. His brother had been dead almost twenty years and would never know he had a son or grandchild, but both of them still lived on. What was in the past didn't just stay in the past, no matter how buried it seemed.

Then again. Avery told the whole world that he had two sons, and always meant it.

Just like Gunnar said, when anyone asked, that he had three children.

A son, and two daughters.

Just like he now had a place he called home, with roots to put down. Stability, warmth, comfort. Something solid, and his. A family, even without some of the most important people that had made that up; a slightly shorted constellation.