(no subject)

He waits a day. Not because he's particularly worried or hesitant, but because he needs the time to gather himself, to meditate on what this means, To the extent that he was thinking about it, he wasn't thinking about it as a real, imminent possibility, and now he needs to shift his thinking in that direction.

This is not just tossing some genetic material in someone's general direction. It was never going to be anything like that. This is the closest thing, since Florence, that he's had to a sister. Which makes this more than a little weird, not that it wasn't weird anyway.

So on the evening after the evening after, he feels ready. He's not sure of the outcome of this - there's all the difference in the world between vague, idle speculation and actually proposing a thing - but he's also feeling calm.

Family means different things all the time. Even as there's a core that never changes.

He leans across the center island in the kitchen, a pot of pasta sauce simmering on the stove behind him, to where Neil is seated doing something or other on the laptop. "So we gotta talk. If you have a second."