Chapter 1 #2
Garrett looked genuinely puzzled. “I’m bringing extension cords.”
“I know.”
“Then what?”
She could not explain it without making the morning sound larger than it was. Garrett was going to an office luncheon. He was helping set up. Willa had sent him a silly photograph. None of it deserved the pressure gathering behind Miranda’s eyes.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m tired.”
Garrett’s expression softened at once. He set the pancake down and rubbed his hand along her upper arm. “Go back to bed after I leave. I’ll take Owen tonight.”
Miranda nodded because he meant it. Whether the night would unfold that way was another question, but Garrett always meant his promises when he made them.
His phone buzzed again on the table. This time he did not look at it immediately, though his eyes moved toward the screen before returning to her face.
“I should shower,” he said. “Willa’s going to kill me if she has to carry those baskets inside herself.”
Miranda looked down at Owen as Garrett left the kitchen. Their son had found the drawstring on her robe and was pulling it toward his mouth with both fists, completely absorbed in the discovery.
From the hallway, the shower started. A moment later Garrett’s phone lit again beside the syrup, and Willa’s name appeared across the screen before fading into black.
Miranda watched the screen go dark without touching it.
She could have lifted the phone and carried it upstairs, could have called through the bathroom door that Willa was trying to reach him, but the message did not seem urgent enough to justify interrupting the shower, and Garrett had never been precious about his phone.
He left it charging on her side of the bed when his outlet stopped working, handed it to her to answer calls while he drove, and regularly asked her to find photographs he was too impatient to locate himself.
Owen made a wet clicking sound against the drawstring, and Miranda worked it free from his mouth. His outrage lasted only until she offered him her knuckle, which he seized with both hands and gnawed with determined concentration.
“You don’t even have teeth,” she told him. “This is an unreasonable amount of confidence.”
The phone lit again, though no sound accompanied it this time. Miranda looked despite herself and saw only the first few words beneath Willa’s name.
I swear, if you make me?—
The rest disappeared beyond the edge of the notification.
It could have ended in anything: carry these inside alone, tie these baskets to my car, explain to Dennis why the raffle has no prizes.
Willa tended to write as though every inconvenience were part of a private comedy, and Garrett liked supplying the other half.
Miranda stood with Owen against her shoulder and carried him into the living room.
She set him beneath the activity gym, where he stared at the hanging fox with renewed suspicion, then returned to the kitchen for her coffee.
It had gone cold again, and when she tipped it into the sink, the smell made her stomach turn in the same way it had during the first months of pregnancy.
She had not expected to miss the office on a Saturday.
On weekdays, the absence made more sense because everyone else was there while she was home, but weekends had belonged to her long before Owen.
She had spent enough Saturdays answering emails from the couch to resent them properly, complaining to Garrett about clients who discovered emergencies at four-thirty on Friday and colleagues who used quick question as a threat.
Now she missed even that. She missed opening her laptop with a plan for the day and closing it with evidence that she had completed something no one could immediately spit up on.
Her maternity leave had been arranged before Owen’s birth through a combination of company policy, accumulated vacation, and an unpaid extension she and Garrett had decided they could afford if they cut back.
Twelve months had felt extravagant when they signed the paperwork, a whole year in which Owen would learn to roll, sit, crawl, and perhaps walk while Miranda was there to see it.
She had cried in the human resources office when the leave was approved, embarrassed by her own relief and already afraid she would regret taking less.
Willa’s involvement had come later. Halcyon had struggled to find someone willing to accept a one-year contract for a midlevel position that required knowledge of three major accounts and the patience to manage Dennis, who could approve a campaign in a meeting and forget the approval by lunch.
Garrett had mentioned that Willa’s freelance work had dried up, and the suggestion had seemed so obvious that Miranda had made it herself.
She remembered sitting at the kitchen table eight months pregnant, her ankles resting on a dining chair while Garrett called Willa.
She had listened to Willa’s delighted disbelief through the speaker and felt pleased by the neatness of it.
Her leave created a vacancy; Willa needed stability; Garrett’s oldest friend would protect Miranda’s accounts until she returned.
Miranda had spent two weeks training her before Owen was born. Willa had arrived each morning with pastries, three different notebooks, and the kind of gratitude that made Miranda feel generous rather than replaceable.
From upstairs, the shower stopped. Miranda folded the blanket at the edge of the sofa, although it did not need folding, then picked up the burp cloth Garrett had left on the armrest and added it to the hamper in the hallway.
Garrett came down ten minutes later wearing the blue button-down she had suggested. The sleeves were rolled to his forearms, and his hair was still wet enough to leave a dark mark where it touched his collar.
“You were right about the shirt,” he said as he entered the living room. “I look approachable but competent.”
“You look like you’re selling a condominium.”
“A luxury condominium?”
“One with a suspiciously low monthly fee.”
He smiled and crouched beside Owen, who had managed to rotate himself almost ninety degrees beneath the activity gym without rolling over. Garrett put one hand against the baby’s stomach and bent until their noses nearly touched.
“Your mother is flirting with me,” he said. “You don’t need to understand what that means, but you should appreciate it.”