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It takes six months to build their home.

And an entire year before she really lets it be theirs.

She thought it was too soon. She wanted to wait. She claimed she was giving him a chance to change his mind. To take it all back. To make the right decision , she said once, and only once, before learning her lesson—before he taught her that lesson.

Two years later, and she still looks surprised every morning when he wakes her up at the crack of dawn with a steaming mug of coffee, made just the way she likes it—she still seems so unsure of herself when she does the same for him.

Three years, and he thinks it starts to sink in.

Four, and it’s there, the bone-deep knowledge that he’s not going anywhere, he’s sure of it, and she finally is too.

Five years, and they’re at a wedding, and he looks at the bride, and then he looks at her, his Lottie, his love, the same way he’s been looking at her for years, and she finally doesn’t balk.

Six years, she says yes.

Seven, I do .

Eight, and she curled up on his lap, on the porch of their home, on the deck chair he long ago made from the scraps of what this place used to be and carved three-hundred-and-sixty-five strikes onto, and she murmured, “I think you should put a baby in me.”

Eight and one day, he took that task personally.

Nine, and he sat on the same chair, holding the same dream woman on his lap while she cradled the most perfect little girl in the world.

Fifteen, now , and he sits at the kitchen table he made too. Wrapped in a sweater she made. Staring at the life they made.

Their daughter doesn’t know why they celebrate once a month, every month.

She just knows she gets cake.

One day, they’ll tell her what the whittled, wooden objects weighing down the shelves screwed into the living room wall mean.

Why, every morning, she wakes to whispers of how she’s their favorite thing to ever exist—why those words are the last thing she hears before she drifts off to sleep too.

Why her mother disappears on Sundays, not every week anymore, but a lot of them, and brings home an old man who calls himself Grandpa Silas despite their veins not sharing an ounce of the same blood.

She’ll learn why her mother has cloudy days , as they call them. She’ll know what their scars mean. She’ll know what those cakes represent.

But for now, it’s only cake.

Crimson icing smeared across russet skin, mischief illuminates hazel eyes as she holds a fistful of red-velvet out to the very woman she inherited them from.

Delicate fingers wrap around a chubby wrist and bring it the mouth he’s felt with his own every day for over a decade now, exaggerating eating noises coming from his wife as she nips at cake and sticky fingers alike.

From the other side of the kitchen table, he watches his girls silently.

Gazes at them. Admires the duo who are so alike, the same side of the same damn coin.

Feels his heart swell and ache and throb as the woman he loves so damn much dotes on the little girl they created, and their daughter dotes right back, giggling and whispering and loving.

“Ruin wants cake,” the most wonderful, precious surprise of his life croons, and his wonderful, precious wife snickers.

She stands, all long legs and low-waist jeans and healthy curves that fifteen years of stability have granted her, and scoops their pouting girl onto her hip.

“Ruin can’t have cake,” she chides gently, pressing her nose to a soft, dimpled cheek and simply breathing for a long, tender moment. “Let’s find him a different treat.”

Two sets of sticky lips brush his face and then his girls are gone, rushing out the front door and across the land his wife bought so long ago now, the land she nicknamed The Mare’s Nest .

A place of disorder and confusion, of chaos and ruin, but he’s never known it to be that.

He knows a giant, red barn that harbours giant, healing horses.

He knows the collection of rescued creatures that roam the land that needed rescuing too.

He knows the house that was built on the bones of something terrible, that represents something so much better, that’s full of wood and wool and hope.

He knows that the minute her home became his, he never wanted to be anywhere else.

He knows Chaos. He knows her well. He’ll love Chaos until the day he draws his last breath.

And Chaos loves him.