Jonah, though, was on the side I’d planned to sit on next to Peter, with a free stool beside him. I slipped into it and looked around expectantly.

What the hell was everyone waiting for? Did they… did the Collins family pray before eating? Because it was a Sunday? Was that why Peter and Grandpa weren’t moving? Jonah had never prayed before a meal.

Uh….

“Baby Jesus, thank you for our food. Amen,” Grandpa Gus rushed out all of a sudden out of fucking nowhere, startling the fuck out of Peter and me, who both stared at him like we didn’t know who the hell he was anymore.

And….

Did he say baby Jesus?

The cough beside me had me glancing at Jonah, who had his lips pressed together and his gaze straight ahead at the wall behind his mom and Mo.

Glancing back at Grandpa, his cheeks were pink like he didn’t know why the hell he’d said that and was debating whether or not he regretted it.

“Ah, amen,” Sarah managed to get out, sounding pretty damn graceful and not like my gramps had just thanked baby Jesus of all people.

“That’s the last time I let you watch Talladega Nights,” I muttered under my breath just loud enough for my grandpa to hear.

And apparently Jonah too because he coughed, a lot.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grandpa replied before nudging the plate of pancakes closer to the middle of the island, avoiding eye contact. “Okay, let’s eat unless someone else wants to… pray or make another useless comment that I have no reference for.”

I laughed.

But it was Jonah beside me who cleared his throat, reached for the spatula, slid two pancakes onto it before transferring them over to my plate first, as he said, very quietly, very calmly, “I do have a question, were you praying to eight-pound, five-ounce baby Jesus or….”

I threw my head back and laughed a second before I slid off the stool and onto the floor.

It was a long, long time before I managed to start eating.

*

“So…,” I said a while later as I swallowed the last piece of tofu scramble. Beside me, Jonah mopped up the maple syrup he had left over with his final triangle of pancake. I hadn’t kept count, but I was pretty positive he’d eaten at least six of them. Grandpa Gus had mastered the whole grain pancake game a while ago. They were the shit—nutritious, with very little sugar and even a little banana and flaxseed thrown in. “I was going to take Mo to the park and sneak her onto a swing if I can pay some little kid to hop off for a few minutes. Do any of you want to come?”

Please God, please God, don’t let Sarah come….

“I’m meeting Allen for a matinee at noon,” Grandpa was the first one to answer as he wiped his mouth with a napkin.

“I promised Frank and Carl I’d watch the last day of a jiu-jitsu tournament,” Peter added after taking another sip of his coffee.

Please. Please. Please, please, please….

“My only plan was seeing the two of you. It’s my day off from conditioning,” Jonah replied, shooting me a much gentler smile than the rest he’d been shooting me after the baby Jesus incident had landed me on the floor and had Grandpa Gus scowling for an hour. “Mum? You can take the ute if you would rather do something else.”

Sarah, who had been pretty silent the entire breakfast, picking and choosing very specific questions and conversations—but maybe that was because she’d been too busy looking at Mo, handing her pieces of pancake and basically touching her every chance she got—chose that moment to look away from the messy baby who had eaten a record amount of soggy pancake. She blinked. And what I was pretty sure was dread poked at my chest as she said, “I could go for a walk.”

Shit.

I forced a smile onto my face that my grandfather and Peter could recognize from across the fucking galaxy, and I hoped that Jonah couldn’t but wasn’t totally convinced. It was one thing for his mom to be the one who was snappy at me, but it was another for me to be bitchy toward her.

Plus, she’d come today. So that had to be something, I guess.

“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my inner whine out of my tone. “Let me take my little monster upstairs and get her dressed, put some clothes on so I don’t moon anyone, and we can get going.”

“I can get her dressed,” the man at my side claimed.

I lifted a shoulder and nodded before shifting around in my seat and getting up. I grabbed my plate, Jonah’s, Grandpa’s, and Peter’s—Sarah had already rinsed hers and left it in the sink—stealing a smooch against the small head as I passed by, and rinsed those off too.

“Leave them in there, Len. I’ll set the dishwasher later. I found a couple recipes for Mo I wanted to try before I leave,” Grandpa said, still sounding annoyed his baby Jesus thing hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“What kind of recipes?” Sarah asked in a polite voice.

“Apples and chicken.”

That had me making a face. “In the same mush?”

Grandpa Gus shot me a look that said he hadn’t forgiven me yet and wasn’t going to. “Yes. Apples and chicken. I don’t remember what else goes in there, carrots and cinnamon too, I think, and don’t make that face at me. You ate everything I put in front of you when you were a baby and everything I didn’t put in front of you.” He snorted. “You still do.”

I frowned. “These muscles don’t feed themselves.”

“I thought I was the only one who noticed how much Lenny ate. It’s impressive.” This fucker Jonah was nodding at Peter, who was telling him with his own dip of a chin that yeah, he wasn’t imagining how much food I put away every meal. “I’ve wondered a time or two where it all goes.”

That was a nice compliment, at least.

“You should have seen her when she was competing in a higher weight class. She was packing in around five thousand calories a day,” Grandpa Gus said, sounding pretty damn cheerful all of a sudden.

“How many kilojoules is that?”

How the hell he knew the conversion was beyond me, but it only took Peter a second to reply. “About twenty thousand kilojoules.”

“I was doing physical activity for several hours every day,” I tried to explain drily, not enjoying the stunned face Jonah was making.

“I eat around twenty-thousand now to maintain my weight,” he said, his expression turning into an amused grin that still didn’t amuse me at all.

“I have a high metabolism. It’s a gift,” I threw out again to the haters. “And I needed to gain weight. Thank you. It was your idea, Grandpa, for me to go up a weight class.”

No one was listening to me.

“We used to joke that one of us was going to need to get a job at the grocery store to get an employee discount,” Peter chuckled.

“Darling, you have no reason to tease,” Sarah commented out of nowhere with a properly contained smile.

I turned my head to cheerfully gaze at the man who was still looking extremely pleased by the conversation.

“You would eat your meal, then eat whatever your brothers left. Did you forget about hiding cans of Watties when you were in primary school?”

Color rose up on his face instantly, and I couldn’t fucking help it. I couldn’t. “What kind of food did he hide?”

That got the first laugh out of Sarah I’d heard. “Canned spaghetti. Baked beans. Loved them. He would try taking them in his school bag so he would have a snack to eat on the walk home from school.”

I opened my mouth and turned to look at Jonah with it still open. “Did you have to carry around a can opener to eat cold spaghetti and beans?”

His face just got even pinker. “I was growing.”

He had. I was going to die from cuteness overload. My body didn’t know what to do with that.

“Darling, you didn’t grow hardly any until you were sixteen, or did you forget that as well?” Sarah egged on with another light laugh that seemed totally opposite of the distance she’d been showing.

“I was saving up the calories and the energy for the future,” he replied under his breath.

I snickered.

“It’s hard to see it now, but he was a skinny thing for so long. We thought he was going to take after me instead of his dad. Do you remember all those talks we had with you when you were younger?”

“Yeah,” he responded with a normal smile. “Used to tell me how it wasn’t important that I was smaller than the other boys. That all that mattered was that I use my ticker and that I try my best and work harder than the rest of them. Dad would have a list of all the shorter players who made careers of it, so I’d know it was possible. If I remember correctly, you fed me all that food to get me to bulk up so at least I wasn’t all skin and bones.”

Then he sniffed and blinked, and I had to swallow because was he getting fucking emotional thinking about his parents trying to make him feel better about being short and scrawny? To tell him that he could still pursue this dream of his even though biology worked against him? Damn it. Goddamn it.

I pressed my lips together and forced myself to keep my eyes open for a few seconds.