I try Ava's habit for exactly four days before I nearly forget about it entirely, which feels, in its own small way, like proof of her point.
The first few attempts feel forced, deliberate in a way that makes the noticing itself feel like just another task to complete rather than something genuine. I catalogue small things dutifully each evening — the particular color the sky turns before rain, the way Toren always ties his boots wrong on the left foot, the exact number of steps between the Guild hall and home — and none of it feels like the kind of seeing Ava actually meant. It feels like homework. Homework I'm bad at, ironically, despite being good at nearly everything else I set my mind toward these days.
But on the fifth evening, sitting across from Vereen while he mends a tear in his cloak by firelight, something makes me actually look — really look, the way I've been trying to remember to — rather than simply existing in his presence while my mind runs ahead toward tomorrow's training.
He's humming.
Not loudly. Barely audible, really, threaded so quietly beneath his concentration that I suspect he doesn't fully realize he's doing it. But it's there, unmistakable once I actually notice it — the same wandering, formless tune Aileen used to hum while she cooked, half-remembered and imperfectly recreated, but unmistakably hers.
I don't say anything. I just watch him for a long moment, needle moving steady through worn fabric, humming a dead woman's song without seeming to know he's carrying her forward in the smallest possible way.
It's the kind of thing I would have walked straight past a week ago. The realization sits with me long after the fire's burned down — not sad, exactly, though it carries its own quiet weight. Mostly, it just feels like proof that Ava was right about something important: the things worth noticing rarely announce themselves. They just wait, patient and unassuming, for someone to actually look.
The noticing becomes its own quiet practice over the following weeks, and the strange thing is, once I actually start paying attention, I realize how much has changed around me that I'd simply failed to catalogue while I was busy chasing the next milestone.
Vereen laughs more now. Not the careful, effortful laughter of those first grieving years — something looser, more automatic, the kind that used to come easily to him before everything changed. He teases me more too, the way he used to tease Aileen, a particular rhythm of affection I'd half-forgotten existed between us until I started actually watching for it.
"You've got dirt on your face," he tells me one evening, not bothering to hide his amusement. "Right there. No, the other side. Spirits, how do you manage to train all day and come home looking like you wrestled a pig instead of a sword?"
"Toren tripped me into a mud puddle."
"And you let him?"
"I was distracted."
"By what?"
I don't have a good answer — the truth is I was thinking about the overflow numbers again, wondering what Wisdom and Agility might actually be accumulating toward — so I just shrug, and Vereen laughs properly, head tipping back, the sound filling the small kitchen in a way that still catches me slightly off guard each time it happens, like sunlight breaking through clouds I've stopped expecting to part.
"There's my boy," he says, still grinning, reaching over to wipe the dirt away himself with a cloth. "Muddy and distracted and getting his backside handed to him by children half his skill level. Some things never change."
"I could still beat you."
"You absolutely could not." He says it with such immediate, cheerful confidence that I nearly believe him, before remembering the disarmed sword still leaning in the corner from three weeks ago. He seems to remember it at the exact same moment, expression shifting into something more rueful. "Alright. Maybe you could. I'm choosing to remain in denial about that specific fact for as long as possible."
Lira notices the change too, when she visits that same week, cloak still damp from an early rain, honey cake balanced carefully in one hand the way she's carried them for years now, ever since that first small kindness after the funeral.
"You're different lately," she tells Vereen, settling into her usual seat by the fire, studying him with the particular sharpness of someone who's known a person long enough to track every small shift in them. "Lighter. I don't think I've seen you properly laugh in — Spirits, I don't actually know how long."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's an observation." She smiles, warm and a little teasing. "A good one. I've been waiting years to see you climb back out from under all that weight you've been carrying. Was starting to wonder if you'd forgotten how."
Vereen's expression softens into something more vulnerable than his usual careful composure. "Some days I still forget," he admits. "But less often than I used to. I think—" he glances toward me, something searching in his expression. "I think watching him grow reminded me there was still something worth actively living for, rather than just enduring. Took me longer to actually believe it than it should have."
"Nobody ever accused you of moving quickly through your own feelings," Lira says, not unkindly, reaching over to squeeze his hand briefly. "But you got there. That's what matters."
I watch the exchange carefully, cataloguing it the way I've been practicing — two people who've carried each other through the worst years of both their lives, still choosing, evening after evening, to show up for one another. It strikes me, watching them, that healing was never something Vereen managed alone. Lira held pieces of it too, steady and patient, exactly the way she's held pieces of my own life since I was four years old and didn't yet understand what I'd lost.
"Thank you," I tell her, unprompted, once Vereen's stepped outside briefly to bring in more firewood. "For staying. All these years."
Lira blinks, clearly caught off guard by the sudden earnestness. "Where else would I have gone?" she asks, though her voice has gone a little thick around the edges. "You're my family too, sweet boy. Have been since long before I had any official reason to be."
I think about that long after she's gone home for the evening — about family built from choice and stubborn loyalty rather than blood alone, about how much wider the shape of "ours" has grown since the winter everything nearly fell apart entirely. Han, the blacksmith she's been courting so carefully all these years, has started joining her on visits sometimes now too, quiet and a little shy but clearly smitten, and even that small addition feels like one more thread in a family quietly stitching itself back together, one patient year at a time.
The wooden toy sits on its shelf for years, gathering dust nobody quite has the heart to clear — the half-finished wolf Vereen started carving before the raid, abandoned mid-project the day everything changed, a small, unfinished thing neither of us has ever mentioned out loud.
I notice it properly for the first time in longer than I can remember on an ordinary evening, dust catching gold in the firelight, and something about finally seeing it — really seeing it, the way I'm trying to see things now — makes me ask the question I've apparently been avoiding for years without realizing it.
"Why did you stop?" I ask, nodding toward the shelf. "The wolf. You never finished it."
Vereen's hands still over his own work. He glances toward the shelf, something complicated passing over his face — old grief, mostly, though something gentler moves underneath it too.
"I started that the week before," he says quietly, not needing to specify before what. Some sentences in our house have never needed the rest of their words spoken aloud. "Was going to be a set. One for each of your birthdays, until you'd outgrown wanting them. Wolf, then a bird, then something bigger once you were old enough to appreciate the detail." He shakes his head slowly. "Never got past the wolf. Couldn't bring myself to pick the knife back up after. Every time I tried, my hands just—" He stops, flexing his fingers like the old memory still lives somewhere in the joints. "It didn't feel right, finishing something we'd started together without her here to see it."
"Together?"
"She used to sit with me while I carved," he says, a small, sad smile finally surfacing. "Hum while I worked. Tell me I was doing the ears wrong, every single time, even though I never once actually got them wrong. It was our thing. Small, stupid thing, but ours." He looks at me properly now, something searching in his expression. "I didn't realize you still noticed it sitting there."
"I notice more than I used to," I admit. "I'm trying to, anyway."
He studies me a moment longer, something tender and slightly amazed in his expression, like he's only now fully registering how much I've grown into someone capable of noticing things like unfinished grief sitting quietly on a shelf.
"Your mother would like that about you," he says. "The noticing. She always said the world needed more people willing to actually pay attention, rather than just moving through it."
He reaches for the shelf, retrieving the small, unfinished wolf with hands gentler than I've ever seen him use for anything. He turns it over once, twice, testing the old, half-carved shape against fingers that clearly remember exactly where he left off.
"Maybe it's time," he says, mostly to himself.
He finishes it three evenings later, working quietly by the fire while I run through Swords Mastery forms in the corner, close enough to watch without hovering.
I don't say anything through the process, sensing, correctly, that this is something he needs to do mostly in silence. But I watch — really watch, the way I've been practicing — the careful, patient strokes of his knife, the particular tenderness in how he shapes the small wooden ears Aileen always claimed he got wrong, though looking at them now, finished, they look exactly right to me.
When he finally sets the knife down, the wolf sits complete in his palm — small, imperfect, undeniably finished — and something in his shoulders eases that I don't think has fully released in the six years since he first picked up the knife and couldn't bring himself to continue.
"There," he says softly, turning it over one final time. "Took long enough."
He holds it out to me.
"This should have been yours years ago," he says. "I'm sorry it took me this long to give it to you properly."
I take it carefully, the wood still warm from his hands, and feel something thick and complicated rise in my throat — grief and gratitude tangled so closely together I can't fully separate one from the other.
"Thank you," I manage, turning the small wolf over in my own palm, tracing the shape of ears that took six years and an entire childhood to finally get finished. "I'll keep it. Always."
"I know you will." He rests a hand briefly on my shoulder, warm and steady. "You keep everything that matters. Always have. Even when I forget to notice you doing it."
He pulls me into a brief, firm hug then, the kind he's gotten better at giving freely these past months, and for a moment the whole small house feels warm enough to hold every single thing we've both lost and rebuilt inside it at once, grief and healing sitting together at the same table, finally, without either one needing to make room by pushing the other out.
That night, lying in bed with the small wooden wolf resting on the shelf beside my own bed now, I think about how much has actually changed since that terrible first winter — not erased, never erased, but reshaped into something we've learned to carry together rather than each of us hauling alone in separate silence.
Vereen still visits Aileen's grave every month, same as always, but he brings me with him now more often than not, and we talk about her there instead of standing in careful, grief-heavy silence the way we used to. He tells me stories I've never heard before — small, specific things, the particular way she used to burn the first batch of bread every single time without fail, the terrible singing voice she was inexplicably proud of despite every evidence to the contrary, the exact expression she wore the day she found out she was pregnant with me, caught somewhere between terror and the most complete joy he'd ever witnessed on another person's face.
"She cried for an hour," he tells me, on one such visit, kneeling to clear a stray weed from beside the marker. "Happy crying, though I couldn't tell at first, and nearly panicked thinking something was wrong. Took her most of that hour just to get the words out properly. We're going to be parents, Vereen. Actual parents. Like she still couldn't quite believe it, even saying it out loud."
"Were you scared?"
"Terrified." He laughs, soft and fond. "Convinced I was going to do something wrong immediately, break you somehow just by holding you incorrectly. Your mother had to talk me through holding you properly for the better part of a week before I actually believed I wasn't about to drop you."
"You never told me that before."
"There's quite a lot I haven't told you yet," he admits. "Been trying to fix that lately. Figured you deserved more of her than just the ending. She was a whole person, long before she was anyone's mother. Deserves to be remembered as one."
I catalogue every single story carefully, the way I've learned to catalogue the things that matter, building a version of my mother I never got old enough to know for myself, one careful, hard-won memory at a time. Some days he tells me about her stubbornness — the time she argued a traveling merchant down to nearly nothing over a bundle of herbs, simply because she'd decided the original price was unreasonable and refused to budge on principle alone. Other days it's smaller things — her habit of humming while she worked, the specific way she'd tilt her head when she was truly listening to someone rather than just waiting for her turn to speak, the particular golden color her eyes caught in firelight, so like my own that Vereen sometimes has to look away for a moment before continuing.
"Do you think she'd be proud?" I ask him once, on one such visit, staring at the small, weathered marker with her name carved into it. "Of who I'm becoming?"
Vereen doesn't answer right away, considering the question with the same careful seriousness he gives most things now.
"I think she'd be proud of exactly who you are," he says finally. "Not just who you're becoming. She always saw people clearly, your mother. Saw the whole shape of a person, not just the parts still under construction." He glances down at me, something warm and certain in his expression. "I think she'd look at you now — stubborn, thoughtful, still trying to notice the things you almost missed — and she'd recognize every single piece of it as exactly the boy she raised for four short years and loved with everything she had."
I don't have words for how that lands, so I don't try to find any. I just stand beside him, quiet, the two of us together in a grief that's finally learned how to make room for warmth alongside it.
I think, walking home that evening, about Ava's lesson, and Vereen's own hard-won honesty, and the particular, quiet miracle of two people slowly, imperfectly, learning how to heal in the same direction instead of alone. I think about Lira too, steady and patient across six years of showing up when she didn't have to, and about the small wooden wolf waiting on my shelf, finished at last, carrying two people's love inside it instead of just one grieving man's stalled grief.
It isn't the family I would have chosen, given the choice. I would have kept her, if the universe had ever once asked what I actually wanted. Some nights, that particular ache still surfaces sharp and sudden, catching me off guard in the middle of an otherwise ordinary evening — a smell, a sound, a stray memory Vereen shares that lands harder than he probably intends. Grief doesn't finish just because healing starts alongside it. I've learned that much, these past years. The two live together now, tangled and inseparable, the way Vereen's humming carries Aileen forward even when he doesn't consciously mean it to.
But it's the family I have. And somewhere along the way, without either of us fully noticing the exact moment it happened, it became enough to build a genuinely good life around — not despite the grief we still carry, but alongside it, the way Vereen carries Aileen's unfinished wolf now finally, gently, completed.
I fall asleep that night without needing to remind myself to look for what I might have missed. For once, I've already seen it, clear and warm and unmistakably real, sitting right in front of me the whole time — a father who's learned to laugh again, a family friend who never once considered leaving, a small wooden wolf finished six years too late but finished all the same, and a mother remembered in stories instead of only in silence.
Tomorrow will bring its own demands, the way it always does — training, the stubborn candle still waiting for me at Ava's side of the yard, whatever comes next in a life that's never once slowed down long enough to let me fully catch my breath. But tonight, at least, I let myself simply rest inside what we've managed to rebuild, grateful for it in a way I don't think I would have been capable of a year ago, before I learned to actually look.