The Hayes kitchen had three conversations running, and none of them were about her.

Poppy dropped her bag inside the front door, and her mother's voice found her before her mother's eyes did.

"Poppy, where's the brown sugar? I told your father to pick up brown sugar, and he came home with regular, and now the glaze is just sitting there."

"Pantry, second shelf, behind the cornstarch." Poppy kicked off her shoes. "You bought two bags last week."

The refrigerator was wallpapered as usual. Fox's soccer schedule pinned under a magnet from the Blue Ridge Mountains, a crayon drawing that might have been a horse, Daisy's last postcard from Bali tucked between a grocery list and a third-grade picture of Poppy, her front teeth missing and her smile enormous.

"I bought two bags last week?" Her mother was already digging in the cupboard. "When did I buy two bags last week?"

"Tuesday. I was on the phone with you when you were at the grocery store." Poppy hung her jacket on the hook by the door, the one between her father's and the empty one that had been Daisy's since high school. "You said the pumpkin pie recipe called for one and you grabbed two because they were on sale."

Her mother pulled the bags from behind the cornstarch and held them up as evidence of a miracle she didn't remember producing. "How do you remember that?"

Because you were telling me about the caterer at the same time, and you didn't hear me when I said I got the flyer position.

"I just do." Poppy crossed the kitchen and kissed her mother's cheek. Her mother cupped the back of Poppy's head without looking, a one-handed gesture of affection delivered between the brown sugar and the glaze. Then her fingers trailed off Poppy's shoulder as she turned to the food.

As she entered the kitchen, Marigold's hand brushed Poppy's forearm. "Welcome home, little sis." She kept walking. "Mom, I need you to focus." She plopped down at the kitchen table, laptop open. "Tyler's mother just added four people to the guest list. Second cousins. We are twelve over the venue cap, and you told me you would handle the Richardsons."

"The Richardsons have been friends of this family for twenty years, Marigold."

"The venue holds one hundred and seventy-five people, Mom. It doesn't account for twenty years of friendship."

Her mother turned from the stove long enough to point the wooden spoon. "The Richardsons are coming to the wedding."

"Then who do I cut? Because the math doesn't work. I have been telling you the math doesn't work since October and you keep adding people." Marigold's voice climbed half a register. She turned to Poppy. "Tell her the math doesn't work."

Poppy held up her hands and drifted to the living room, where her father and her brother-in-law had the pregame coverage on, volume turned up against the kitchen noise. Her father raised a hand from the couch. "Hey, baby girl."

"Hey, Dad."

"How was the bus ride?"

"Long." She leaned over the couch, the cushion dipping on the left side where her father had watched football since before Poppy was born, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. He patted her arm twice without looking away from the screen. Her brother-in-law waved a chip at her in greeting.

Then something caught his attention. "Iris, he's got the spoons again."

Her oldest sister rounded the corner with the toddler on her hip, a wooden spoon in each of his fists. She caught Poppy in a one-armed hug, her hair the same honey-blond as their mother's pulled back in a knot that was losing its fight with the afternoon, the toddler's spoon clacking against Poppy's shoulder blades. "Oh good, you're here. Take him for a second. I have to find the thing for the thing."

The toddler was in Poppy's arms before Iris finished the sentence. She settled him on her hip, his sticky hand finding her collar, and he began drumming one spoon against her shoulder while she bounced him toward the kitchen.

Marigold was peering in the second oven, pointing at the pecan pie. "Mom, you know Tyler's mother has a tree nut allergy."

"The pecan pie is my mother's recipe. Tyler's mother can have the pumpkin."

"Mom."

"What? There's pumpkin."

Marigold leaned her head on Poppy's shoulder, her blond hair smelling like the vanilla perfume she'd worn since high school. "Tell me my wedding isn't going to be this chaotic."

"The math doesn't work." Poppy squeezed her sister's elbow with her free hand, the toddler redistributing his weight on her opposite hip. "But your wedding is going to be beautiful."

"Poppy, can you check the rolls?" He mother called. "I can't leave the gravy."

She checked the rolls. Golden, not done. "A few more minutes."

"Poppy, is there cranberry sauce? Tell me someone bought cranberry sauce."

"I brought some. It's in my bag by the door."

"You brought cranberry sauce?"

"You say this every year, Mom."

Her mother huffed, her honey-blond bangs fluttering. "I do not say this every year."

"You do," her father called from the couch.

"You do," Iris and Marigold confirmed.

The kitchen moved around her, and Poppy moved through it, touching everyone she passed. A hand on her father's shoulder as she squeezed behind the couch. A palm pressed flat against Marigold's back while they navigated the narrow hallway at the same time, framed photos hanging too close together on both sides because the family kept expanding faster than the wall space. Her fingers straightening her mother's hair, a reflex so practiced neither of them registered the gesture. Iris's wrist, squeezed once as they swapped the toddler again, a wordless transaction between two bodies that had performed this exchange across a dozen holidays.

She filled the gaps. She always filled the gaps. This kitchen had taught her the choreography when she was young enough to believe that knowing what someone needed before they asked for it was the same thing as being known.

Fox found her at the counter.

He pressed his shoulder against her arm and stayed. Ten years old, dark-haired like their father, a scab on his left knee from a soccer slide tackle. In a house this loud, he was the pause.

"How was your orgo exam?" He looked up at her. "The real answer."

Poppy's hands stilled on the napkin she was folding. She'd told him about the exam once, on a video call, while he was showing her his scab. She had assumed the detail dissolved into the background.

"Brutal." She bumped her shoulder against his. "Cried twice. But I think I passed."

"I know you did."

He said it with the total conviction of someone who'd never been given a reason to doubt her. He was ten. His faith in Poppy was whole and uncut, offered without conditions, and the steadiness of certainty pressed behind her eyes.

"I showed my teacher the video of you." He pulled his tablet from under his arm. "I was looking for you during the cheer parts. You're hard to find when everyone's in the same uniform. But then you ran onto the field."

He turned the screen toward her to reveal a wide shot of the Thorndale stadium. A small blond figure sprinting across the turf toward number forty-three. The collision. Her legs around his waist. His arms around her. The announcer's voice, tinny through the tablet speaker: "And we've got a celebration on the field, folks. That's a moment right there."

The kiss.

Five days since her lips had been on Grant's. Five days of checking the phone, drafting four texts, deleting all of them because every version either said too much or pretended the kiss was something a text could contain. She had stayed in motion. Packed her bag, caught the bus, folded napkins, checked the rolls, held the baby. Kept her hands full so her mind stayed quiet.

The footage undid the work. She was back on the field, the cold turf under her sneakers, the November air sharp against her bare legs, and then the jarring solidity of his pads when she hit his chest and the cold evaporated. Gone like it had never in three months of New Haven winter, not with the hand warmers he slipped into her jacket, not with the scarf that came off his neck and went around hers, not with his hands closing over her fingers in the hallway at halftime. Those had been kindnesses, small and careful, warmth offered at the edges. The kiss was the center.

His arms around her and heat flooding through her so fast her skin couldn't track where it started, his chest, his palms, his mouth, all of it arriving at once until she was warm in places she had forgotten were cold.

She had kissed him the same as she did everything, without a plan, her body arriving before her mind could tell it to stop. Grant had kissed her the way he did everything, with the patience and a certainty she wanted to drown in. She didn't know what they were now. What she knew for sure know was what his mouth had said against hers without a single word, and how her chest could still feel the impression of his heart pounding in time with hers.

Those two facts didn't add up to a conclusion she could fold into thirds and set in its proper place.

Her fingers had creased the napkin wrong. She smoothed it flat and started over, and that was when she registered the silence.

The kitchen had gone quiet.

Not the gradual quiet of a conversation winding down. The sudden, held-breath quiet of six people staring at the same screen. Poppy could hear the pregame coverage from the living room. The refrigerator humming. Her nephew banging his spoon in the highchair. Every other sound in the house had stopped.

Her mother turned from the stove.

Marigold's fingers froze on her keyboard.

Iris stood in the doorway with a dish towel over one shoulder, still as a photograph.

"Oh, that's right. The kiss." Her mother crossed the kitchen in three steps and took Poppy's face in both hands. "I tried to call you and then Iris needed help with the bath and your father was on the roof doing something dangerous with the gutters and the day got away from me. I kept thinking, she'll be home Thursday anyway." Her thumbs traced Poppy's cheekbones. "My girl was on national TV. Kissing her boyfriend."

The whole room had turned. Marigold's laptop was closed. The TV was muted. Her father stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

The room had stopped for her.

The room never stopped for her.

Her mother's hands were warm against her face, and the brightness in her mother's expression was the one Poppy had spent twenty-one years cataloguing on other people. The full beam. The one captured in a picture on the mantel taken on Iris's wedding day. The one her mother aimed at Marigold when the engagement was announced. The one she aimed at Daisy during the rare calls home. Poppy had never stood in the center of that beam, not at this wattage, not with the whole kitchen holding still around her.

Boyfriend. Her mother meant Charlie, the boyfriend Poppy had had in September, his name half-heard on a phone call her mother had taken while booking the venue for Marigold's wedding. She had told her mother about the breakup in October, but the information had landed between the caterer's quote and the florist's availability.

The boy on the screen was Grant. Not her boyfriend. Not Charlie.

Grant, who was her friend. Her good friend. Her best friend at Thorndale outside of Skylar. She couldn't imagine Thorndale without him.

The boy she kissed on live TV.

The man who hadn't touched her until the hallway at half-time, his hands wrapping around hers like a tiny hug.

She opened her mouth to speak. The sentence was right there. Mom, that's not the same person. Charlie and I broke up in September. The confusion would wash away, and her mother's hands would fall. Marigold would return to her guest list. Iris would pick up her son. The beam would shift and the kitchen would resume its noise and Poppy would go back to folding napkins and knowing where the brown sugar was and being the daughter who was always fine.

Her mother's thumbs were still on her cheekbones.

"He's very handsome." Her mother tilted Poppy's face gently, as if the footage on the tablet had somehow changed the shape of her daughter.

"He is." The words came easily. The safe ones always did. "His name's Grant. He's a running back. Senior, pre-med, quiet until he's funny, and then he's the funniest person in the room." She heard herself talking and couldn't stop. "He remembers things. Like, I told him my coffee order once, and he just knows it now. I mentioned my hands go numb on the sideline, and the next game he had hand warmers in his jacket. He doesn't make a thing of it. He just remembers. People think he isn't listening because he's quiet. He's listening to everything."

"That's a good quality in a man," her father said from the doorway.

"Is he tall?" Marigold had drifted closer, the guest list forgotten.

"Taller than me."

Everyone laughed. At five-two, Poppy was the shortest person in the family besides Fox. Her younger brother was on track to surpass her soon. "He's steady. That's the thing about him. Everything around him can be chaos and he's just this calm, solid person in the middle."

"Sounds like someone's opposite," Iris said, and the kitchen laughed again.

Poppy laughed too. Her mother's hands were still on her face.

"Looks like he's a good kisser, huh?" Marigold winked.

Heat climbed Poppy's cheeks. Her mother's thumb caught the flush, and her smile deepened, reading it as confirmation of the story she already believed.

Poppy didn't describe how her fingers had gripped the back of his neck. Or the half-second pause when she could have pulled away and chose not to. Or how the stadium had disappeared when his arms closed around her, forty thousand people reduced to the sound of his breath against her ear. Or that they hadn't spoken since. Five days of no communication. The longest stretch since they met in August.

The kitchen came to life around her. Marigold reopened her laptop. Iris returned to the toddler. Her mother squeezed Poppy's arm once and turned to stir the gravy. Her father unmuted the TV.

Fox was still beside her.

"Your boyfriend seems nice," he said.

Poppy picked up the napkin she had been folding. "He really is."

She would fix things later. After the holiday. For now, this was one assumption she could stand. Because for thirty seconds, the whole house had stopped moving to focus on her.

Grant was a friend.

Her family was happy.

She was home.

What harm could one little white lie do.

Read what happens next in Poppy and Grant's full-length novel, Second Option. Coming Soon.

Turn the page for a preview of Next Play, Charlie and Skylar's romance.