Sinner and Saint

Epilogue

Grayson pursed his lips and glanced around innocently. "But you guys told me I could eat all of the pieces I'd touched. I felt so sick afterwards."

"Well, you can share the cake with Jonas later. It's still in the fridge," I told him as he followed me out toward the door leading to the deck. "Francie made an identical cake this morning after breakfast while you were all playing outside. She tied up her hair and wore food-safe gloves so I think this might be safe enough to eat."

"Of course, she did," Grayson said with a roll of his eyes. "She looks at something and all she sees are microbes crawling all over it. I just want to do things without worrying about what I can't see."

"Your sister sees the world a little differently, Gray, but that's not a bad thing so I expect you to respect that," I told him as we walked down the flight of stairs. "Don't trivialize her interests just because you don't share them. She never says a mean thing about how much you love soccer."

"But soccer's normal..." Grayson muttered under his breath.

I stopped in place and glanced down at my son, looking at him intently. He was, in so many ways, so much like his mother.

All our children share Kady's tight, springy curls but they were all a very similar caramel brown color that was lighter than hers. They had golden skin, light brown eyes and varying amounts of faint little freckles on their faces.

But Grayson didn't just look a lot like his mother physically. He was stubborn and unapologetically candid like her, often acting with that wild, restless quality that we have to keep an eye on. He was a good kid, no question about it. But he usually acts first and thinks later that he and I have been having more in-depth conversations lately.

"Normal is subjective, based on individual perception which changes with people's backgrounds and experiences," I explained. "And considering how different people are from each other, there is not one single definite way of qualifying what's normal. Something might be common or popular but that doesn't mean it defines what's normal."

Grayson furrowed his brows in concentration as he tried to follow that reasoning along. Then he scowled at me. "You're saying that just because Francie doesn't like the popular stuff like sports or movies, it doesn't mean she's not normal."

"Exactly." I smiled, telling myself to resist going all the way to a philosophical debate with an eleven-year-old. And I knew, whether or not Grayson fully comprehended what I just told him, he was never going to turn his back on his siblings. Kady and I had to meet with the school principal last month after he'd gotten into a fistfight with some boys who'd been taunting Francie. He may not understand her all the time but he loved her.

I nudged him gently with an elbow. "To be perfectly honest, there's nothing wrong with being different from everyone else. It can draw attention that may or may not be wanted, I admit, but being able to stay true to who you are and what you care about is a freedom not many can dare to seize for themselves.We have to give people who have, the credit they deserve."

This time, Grayson's expression turned astute. "You're talking about Mom again, aren't you?"

I grinned and straightened up. "I know a lot of people who have but yes, your Mom is certainly one of them."

He rolled his eyes although there was a teasing light in his gaze. "You find every excuse to moon over Mom. It's embarrassing, Dad. You're both old."

"And you're disrespectful," I said with a laugh as we reached the party downstairs.

When it was our turn to host, the adults would usually be scattered around the yard while majority of the children, if not in the middle of a lawn game, would be somewhere in the playhouse. When I designed this structure with Kady over a decade ago, I had no real idea of how prominently it would feature in the shared childhood memories of all the children in our tight-knit circle. But even as some of them are starting to outgrow it, they keep coming back.