The next morning, Noah found himself outside on purpose.

  This was, objectively, suspicious behavior for a man whose definition of an "outdoor activity" usually maxed out at walking to the campus coffee cart in a stiff breeze.

  It was crisp in that mid-October way where the air felt sharpened overnight. Leaves had started their annual dramatic exit—turning bright and gorgeous as if to compensate for the fact that in a few weeks they'd all be dead on the ground like nature's confetti after a party nobody remembered agreeing to attend.

  Emma walked slightly ahead of them, pulling a red wagon that Mark had produced from the garage with the explanation that "you'll need something for the pumpkins." She seemed to vibrate with barely contained energy, like standing still was a physical impossibility. Chloe kept pace beside her sister, quieter, taking everything in with careful attention.

  Rachel walked beside Noah, her hand tucked into his like it belonged there. Her thumb traced idle patterns over his knuckles, which made his brain temporarily forget how to coordinate walking.

  They were headed to what Mark had called "the fall market"—a seasonal event that had apparently decided to combine Thanksgiving, Halloween, and aggressive autumn aesthetics into one continuous commercial experience. There would be pumpkins. There would be apples. There would be a suspicious amount of decorative hay.

  Someone was making a lot of money off the concept of vibes.

  The walk was only about fifteen minutes, Mark had said. Close enough that the wagon made sense, far enough that Emma had already asked twice if they were almost there yet.

  "So," Emma said, turning to walk backward for a few steps, breaking a silence that had lasted approximately thirty seconds. "Do you guys do this kind of thing in Brookfield? The whole pumpkin market thing?"

  "I don't," Noah said. "Not since moving out, at least.”

  "Never?" Emma looked genuinely surprised.

  "Usually the seasons just change, and I forget to acknowledge them until I'm shivering at a crosswalk in the wrong jacket," Noah said simply.

  Emma turned her attention to Rachel. "What about you?"

  "My family used to go to a farm stand every fall back home," Rachel said. "My mom would buy way too many pumpkins and then be shocked when we couldn’t carve them all by Halloween."

  "That sounds fun, though," Chloe piped up.

  "It was," Rachel agreed, smiling at the memory. "My dad would complain the entire time about the excess, but he'd still sit there and help hollow them all out. He'd usually eat all the seeds, too, after we baked them."

  Emma grinned. "What kinds of things did you carve? Just faces, or other stuff?"

  "We went way past standard triangles," Rachel said. "My mom treated the dining room table like an art studio. We had stencils, specialized little saws, the works. She took it extremely seriously."

  Noah glanced at her, quietly filing away this small piece of her history—family traditions, cold autumn days, her mom aggressively managing a pumpkin carving station.

  "I guess we'll have to start our own traditions now, though," Rachel said, and her hand squeezed his slightly.

  Noah's chest did something complicated. "Yeah?"

  "Yeah," Rachel said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "New city. New traditions."

  Emma looked delighted. "Does that mean you're going to carve pumpkins with us?"

  Noah looked at Rachel, who was visibly trying not to smile too widely.

  "I guess we are," Noah said.

  "Yes!" Emma pumped her free fist. "Okay, but you have to commit. No half-hearted carving. Full dedication."

  "I wouldn't dream of it," Noah said with absolute, deadpan sincerity. "I'll make sure to put my pumpkin-carving dedication on my resume."

  "Good," Emma said seriously. "Because Chloe and I do not mess around. We have a whole system."

  Chloe nodded solemnly. "It's highly regulated."

  "Well, systems must be adhered to," Noah said, finding himself entirely charmed by their intense stance on decorative gourds.

  They walked for another few minutes, the wagon wheels creaking softly on the pavement. The neighbourhood was quiet—Saturday morning slow, a few people out walking dogs, someone raking leaves into precise piles that would probably blow apart by evening.

  "Can I ask you something?" Chloe asked quietly, directing the question at both of them.

  "Sure," Rachel said.

  "How did you know?" Chloe asked. "That you wanted to be together?"

  Emma made an interested sound, clearly desperate to know the answer but impressively letting her quieter sister lead the interrogation.

  Noah and Rachel exchanged a glance.

  "That's a good question," Rachel said thoughtfully. "I think... it wasn't one specific, lightning-bolt moment. It was a lot of small things adding up."

  "Like what?" Emma prompted.

  Rachel smiled, her thumb resuming its slow path across Noah's knuckles. "Like realizing my favourite part of the day was running into him. Or noticing that just talking to him made the complicated things feel manageable." She paused, her voice softening a fraction. "I realized I was trusting him with things I usually kept to myself. It just felt safe."

  Noah felt the back of his neck warm slightly.

  "What about you?" Chloe asked Noah.

  Noah thought about it. He thought about the late-night conversations by her door, about Rachel looking stressed and letting him help, about the slow, steady disruption of his strictly scheduled life that had somehow become his favourite thing.

  "Similar things," Noah said. He looked at Rachel. "I realized that the days I didn't see her felt incredibly long. Like something important was missing from the schedule."

  Emma nodded like she was processing satisfactory field data. "That's pretty good."

  "Glad it meets your approval," Noah said dryly.

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  "I'm just saying, some people have terrible reasons for dating," Emma said wisely, carrying the heavy authority of someone who had observed a lot of middle school drama.

  Rachel bit her lip, clearly trying not to laugh. "A very fair point."

  They reached the market—a sprawling, chaotic celebration of autumn. Tents flapped in the breeze, hay bales were stacked into decorative pyramids, and a literal sea of pumpkins washed across the ground tarps.

  Emma immediately zeroed in on a display of oddly shaped gourds. "Okay, we need to get at least one weird one. It's more interesting."

  "Weird how?" Noah asked.

  "Like... not perfect. Lumpy. Blob-shaped." She hoisted one that was decidedly asymmetrical and covered in warts. "Like this!"

  Rachel leaned in to examine it. "That's very... organic."

  "It's ugly," Emma said proudly. "But in a good way."

  "There's a good way to be ugly?" Noah asked.

  "Yeah! Perfect pumpkins are boring. The weird ones have personality." Emma deposited it into the wagon with a heavy thud.

  A few feet away, Chloe was examining the traditional pumpkins much more methodically. She picked them up, rotated them with careful consideration, and set them back down.

  "You can pick whichever one you want," Noah offered gently.

  Chloe glanced up at him. "Really?"

  "Yeah. Grab the biggest one you can carry. Or two. That's what the wagon is for, right?"

  She smiled—a small, genuine thing that reached her eyes—and went back to her search with a sudden surge of confidence.

  They wandered deeper into the displays. Emma kept up a running commentary on pumpkin aerodynamics. Chloe selected hers with architectural precision. Rachel pointed out the most photogenic arrangements, looking entirely at ease in the crisp air.

  Noah felt his shoulders drop, the residual tension of the morning finally bleeding away. This part—walking through a loud, absurdly orange market with his sisters and Rachel—was easy. It was so much easier than sitting in a quiet living room, trying to pretend the silence was comfortable instead of feeling like a ghost haunting a life he didn't belong to anymore.

  Emma suddenly pivoted, walking backward for a few paces to study them. "Wait, how long have you two actually been together? Officially? I don’t think you said, last night."

  "About five weeks," Noah answered.

  Emma's eyebrows shot up. "That's really new."

  "It is," Rachel agreed.

  "But you seem really..." Emma paused, searching for the right word. "Comfortable. Like you've known each other forever."

  "We've known each other since the summer," Rachel offered. "We just didn't start dating until September."

  "Oh," Chloe said quietly. "So you were friends first?"

  "Neighbours," Noah corrected. "Then friends. Then... this."

  Emma grinned, turning back around to pull the wagon. "That's kind of cute."

  Noah felt his ears warm slightly. "It's just how the timeline worked out."

  They continued browsing. Someone was selling hot cider that smelled heavily of cloves. A nearby stall featured caramel apples that looked structurally unsound.

  "Okay, new topic," Emma announced, right as they paused in front of a sprawling bin of gourds.

  Noah braced himself.

  "Do you want kids?" Emma asked, direct and entirely unbothered by the sheer weight of the question. "Like, eventually?"

  Noah genuinely almost tripped over a flat piece of cardboard.

  Rachel, however, answered before he could even begin to formulate a response. "Yes."

  Noah turned to stare at her.

  Rachel looked back at him, her expression perfectly calm, though her cheeks had dusted a sudden, distinct pink. "I mean, not immediately. Obviously. But yes. Eventually."

  Emma's eyes went wide. "Really?"

  "Really," Rachel said.

  Chloe looked at Noah. "What about you?"

  Noah’s brain was still trying to process Rachel’s immediate, unflinching yes. "I... haven't thought about it much," he managed.

  "But if you did?" Emma pressed.

  Noah glanced at Rachel. She was watching him with patient, quiet curiosity, giving him all the room in the world to answer honestly.

  "I haven't planned that far ahead," Noah said slowly, his thumb finding its way back to Rachel's knuckles. "But... yeah. With the right person."

  He squeezed her hand. Rachel squeezed back immediately, a warm, solid pressure.

  "When do you think?" Chloe asked, a sudden wistfulness creeping into her voice. "Like, how many years? I want to be an aunt. The cool one, obviously."

  Noah felt his chest tighten with a strange, heavy flutter. "There are a lot of steps between now and then," he said diplomatically. "It's difficult to put a number on it."

  "True," Rachel agreed, though the pink in her cheeks was spreading rapidly. "But it would be nice to still be on the younger side. To actually have the energy to keep up with them. So maybe not decades from now."

  Noah cleared his throat, suddenly finding the cider stand intensely interesting, while Rachel firmly avoided his gaze. They were both blushing furiously.

  They walked in a highly-charged, vibrating silence for a minute. The wagon wheels creaked softly. The air smelled sharp and sweet.

  "I think you'd be good at it," Chloe said suddenly, her voice quiet but clear over the background noise. "The dad thing. If you wanted to be."

  Noah looked at her, completely caught off guard.

  Chloe shrugged, looking a little self-conscious but holding her ground. "You're patient. And you actually listen." She paused. "And you always answer our questions."

  The words landed with a quiet, devastating weight.

  The idea of parenthood innately felt like a risk. He carried a lingering, quiet fear that he might possess some inherited capacity for cruelty, or that when things got difficult, he simply wouldn't know how to stay. But Noah didn't drink. He had never had the slightest inclination to numb himself the way his father had.

  And while he still didn't have a blueprint for what a good parent actually looked like, he realized he possessed an exhaustive, painful catalogue of what they should never do. He knew exactly how not to silence a room. He knew how not to make a child shrink.

  It wasn't a complete roadmap, and the prospect still terrified him on some fundamental level. But standing there, realizing that he had managed to make his sisters feel safe asking questions and being clever without any fear of punishment—it sparked a strange, fragile kind of confidence.

  Something incredibly warm and anchoring settled in his chest, easing the heavy, lingering ghosts of the morning.

  "Thanks, Chloe," Noah said softly.

  Emma grabbed another pumpkin—this one nearly perfectly round. "Okay, I think we're good. We have the blob, we have the round one, we have Chloe's medium perfect one—"

  "It's not perfect," Chloe protested. "It has character."

  "It's very respectable," Rachel said approvingly.

  "Wait." Emma stopped dead, her eyes locking onto a display near the exit. "Look at that."

  Sitting by itself on a hay bale was a gargantuan, aggressively lopsided pumpkin that looked less like a seasonal decoration and more like a deflated orange asteroid. It was a spectacular, structural disaster.

  "We need it," Emma declared.

  "Emma, that won't even fit in the wagon without crushing Chloe's respectable one," Noah pointed out.

  Emma looked at the wagon, then at the giant pumpkin, and then up at Noah with wide, entirely unapologetic eyes.

  Noah sighed, understanding his assignment immediately. "Fine. I'll carry it."

  They paid for the haul and started the walk back. The monstrosity was far too wide to tuck under one arm, forcing Noah to carry it with both hands planted firmly beneath its lumpy base. Its sheer, absurd weight was actually strangely grounding.

  Rachel shared wagon-pulling duty with Chloe for the first few blocks, the two of them navigating the uneven sidewalks while Emma skipped alongside them. Eventually, though, the girls gravitated forward, taking full control of the wagon so they could argue cheerfully about who would be tasked with pulling out all the goopy pumpkin innards.

  Rachel let them go, falling back a few paces to walk right beside Noah.

  "That was sweet," Rachel said quietly, her voice pitched just under the rattle of the wagon wheels ahead of them. "What Chloe said."

  "Yeah," Noah said, adjusting his grip on the giant pumpkin.

  He was still trying to figure out what to do with the feeling it had created—a complicated mix of gratitude and a quiet, sudden sadness that he didn't see them more often. That they were still, in many ways, just polite strangers who happened to share a dinner table a couple times a year at most.

  "You okay?" Rachel asked. With his hands full, she closed the distance between them, bumping her shoulder gently against his arm.

  "Yeah. Just... thinking."

  "About?"

  Noah watched Emma and Chloe walk ahead of them. "About how they barely know me," he admitted. "But they're trying. And I don't know if I've been trying enough."

  Rachel bumped his shoulder again, this time leaving it resting lightly against his bicep as they walked, a warm, steady pressure in the crisp air. "You're here now," she said softly. "That's not nothing."

  Noah glanced sideways at her. "Is it enough, though?"

  "It's a start," Rachel said, her voice firm and steady. "And I think it's a really good one."

  Up ahead, Emma had found a perfectly straight stick and was using it to conduct an imaginary orchestra. Chloe was humoring her, pretending to play the violin with exaggerated, sweeping bows while steering the wagon handle with her free hand.

  Noah watched them. The weight of the weekend was still waiting for him back at the house—the fragile distance-keeping, the perfectly preserved bedroom, the polite, sterile conversations that never quite touched anything real.

  But this part—carrying a gargantuan, absurdly lumpy pumpkin with both hands, Rachel walking close enough to keep him warm, his sisters feeling completely safe to be goofy and loud just a few steps away—this part was okay.

  Really, genuinely okay.

  Rachel leaned her head against his shoulder for a brief, fleeting second. Noah adjusted his grip on the heavy pumpkin and stepped a fraction closer, keeping their arms pressed together as they walked, sharing the quiet warmth against the autumn chill.

  They'd figure out the rest later.