The Family You Find Along the Way
We grow up hearing “Blood is thicker than water,” as if the family we’re born into will always be our closest bond. But life shows us otherwise. The fuller version flips the meaning entirely — “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” — and it’s the one I believe. It’s about bonds forged through shared experience and chosen loyalty.
I think of Kate and Erin on her couch late at night, not speaking, just passing a bottle of wine between them because there’s nothing left to say. Neither will leave the other alone in that moment. That is found family.
Most of us have someone like that — the person we call first when things fall apart. Who is that for you?
These are the ties built through action. The moments where you show up for each other, fight for each other, or sit together in silence. For me, I would choose my best friend over almost anyone else in the world.
For Kate and Erin in Holly & Oak, it’s no different. Kate’s own relatives are disapproving and distant. Erin has lost most of his family and only has his father who is supportive and well-meaning but does not always understand his son. The people who stand beside them in their darkest moments are not the ones they share a surname with.
When Book One opens, Kate and Erin’s bond is already strong. It grew from their shared connection to Alex, Kate’s partner and later wife, and Erin’s sister. After Alex’s death, their connection could have faded. Instead, it endured. It was tempered in grief through the successive losses of Erin’s mother and Alex. They helped each other keep going. It became a bond of shared survival, shared healing, and unconditional loyalty.
Like all families, chosen or otherwise, it is not perfect. Over time, friction creeps in. Erin changes. He carries frustration and anger, and the easy give-and-take between them slips out of balance. The once stable yin and yang dynamic becomes something else entirely. The question now is not whether they love each other, but whether they can adapt to who they are now and find a new equilibrium. Or whether the cracks will keep widening.
Kate and Erin are not the only example of found family in the series. Their circle expands to include Ainsley, Agatha, Eddie, Hunter and Jada, each bringing their own wounds, quirks, and loyalties. Together they share the highs of raucous Thanksgiving dinners and game nights, and the lows of standing shoulder to shoulder on a beach, ready to face Akiko and whatever she plans to unleash. In Holly & Oak, loyalty is not just an emotional choice. It is the difference between surviving what is coming and being destroyed by it.
It is not just about the group, but also the individual relationships within it. Ainsley and Agatha, at the start of Book One, have a deep and loyal friendship. In many ways, Agatha knows Ainsley better than Ainsley knows herself. She sees her developing relationship with Kate clearly and far earlier than Ainsley does. That love and loyalty drive Agatha’s actions from the end of Book One through to her final moments in Book Two. Agatha’s story, perhaps more than anyone else’s, is one of devotion — to her chosen family and to her cause.
You also see both Agatha and Ainsley trust Hunter individually with parts of themselves at their lowest points. There is Agatha with her letter (if you know, you know), and Ainsley sitting on the steps in Hunter’s gym wanting a beer and lamenting that her relationship with Kate is unsalvageable. Then there is Eddie and Hunter’s bond which, as Book Three will show, may reach beyond family into something deeper still.
Whether it is the Thanksgiving kitchen chaos, the quiet beer in Hunter’s gym, or the way they close ranks on the beach, every shared moment becomes another stitch in the family they are making together.
We do not all get the family we need at birth. Some of us build it piece by piece over time, in friends who show up when no one else does, in work colleagues who become confidants, in people who have seen us at our worst and stayed anyway. That is why found family stories resonate so deeply. They speak to the part of us that is still searching, and to the part that is fiercely protecting what we have built.
So, who is in your found family?