38. Positive #3
"Amber." Marlowe grips my shoulders. "You are going to be buried alive in diapers. Towers of them. I'm ordering the first pallet tonight, we're shipping it straight to—"
"Okay, wait." I press my hands to both their chests, laughing. "Wait. Can you two keep a secret? A real one. The kind you take to your grave."
They freeze. They exchange a loaded glance, then swing back to me in unison, eyes enormous.
"...Yes?" Juniper whispers. "Obviously. What is it?!"
I take a breath. "We found a house. Beckett and I signed the intent this week.
It's outside Honeybell Harbor — the far outskirts, a gated little community where nobody can drive past and gawk.
Room for a garden. Room for a nursery." I feel myself glowing and I can't stop it.
"And I've been talking with Sawyer about merging our wedding services.
Combining the two businesses. Which means, for the first time in my entire adult life, I could actually—" the word feels foreign in my mouth, "—rest."
They gawk at me. Juniper's hands fly to her mouth. Marlowe just stares, and for once in her salt-crusted life the woman is speechless.
"A gate," Juniper finally squeaks. "A garden. A nursery. You said nursery. You planned a nursery before you knew there was a baby?"
"I planned a nursery-shaped room," I correct, going warm to the ears. "I told myself it was for storage. I am aware, in hindsight, of what that looks like."
"It looks like your body knew before your spreadsheet did," Marlowe says.
I rush to reassure them, because I know how this sounds. "Don't panic, you two will absolutely still have work, nothing changes for you, I'd never—"
"We don't care about that!" Juniper practically screams, and now she's crying and jumping at the same time. "You're finally taking a break?! An actual break?! A vacation, Amber?!"
I blink. "You guys are... happy?"
"We have been trying to get you to slow down for years," Marlowe says, and her voice has gone thick and real.
"Years, Amber. You work like a woman running from something.
We watched you plan four hundred weddings and never once let yourself picture your own.
And now you've got a pack that adores you and a baby coming and a house with a gate.
So yes. We're happy. We are so happy we could throw you into the marsh. "
I laugh, wet and startled. I'd braced for them to be hurt.
To feel abandoned, or worried about their own paychecks, or quietly resentful that I get the pack and the baby and the house with the gate while they hold down the shop.
It never once occurred to me that the people who love me might simply be glad.
Purely, uncomplicatedly glad. It's such a foreign feeling that I have to sit with it a second to recognize its shape.
"It'll be perfect," Juniper says, wiping her nose on her enormous sleeve. "You can hand it all off. Offload every thread. Rest. Grow that baby. Let those men spoil you. Just — enjoy your pack for once in your life. Be selfish, babe. Just this once. Live a little."
Live a little. The words land deep and unguarded. I turn them over. I've spent so many years being the one who holds everything together that I forgot there was a version of me allowed to simply set it down.
"Live a little," I whisper. "You're right."
"We'll build the whole handoff," Marlowe says, already in logistics mode, already my match in that at least. "You finish the Carroway–Reeve wedding, and the second those two are off on their honeymoon, we start offboarding you. Clean. Gentle. You won't lift a finger you don't want to."
"And you're — you're really okay with all of it?" I ask, small.
"Yes," they say together. Then they're hugging me again, tighter this time. Juniper laughs into my shoulder. Marlowe's arm is a warm iron band across my back.
I let myself be held. That used to be the hardest thing in the world for me — staying still long enough to be loved on instead of bolting off to fix the next thing. I'm getting better at it. I have a lot of motivation now.
"It's finally your turn," Marlowe says against my temple. "Time to take the reins of your own life, Amber. Time to sit down and enjoy the fruit of your labor. God knows you planted enough of it."
I beam at them. At my two impossible, loyal, loud best friends crammed into my tiny bathroom under a string of lights, the smell of lavender and saltwater and my own changing apricot filling the little room.
I nod. I press one hand flat and certain over the brand-new life in my belly, and I draw a long, shaking, hopeful breath.
A week ago I stood in my ransacked office and told an empty room that being pregnant was impossible.
A month ago I couldn't have pictured a single piece of this — the pack, the house, the baby, the two women who love me too loudly for one small bathroom.
The plans I've been white-knuckling my entire life are finally, quietly rearranging themselves into something that looks less like a schedule and more like a home.
I guess… this is actually going to work.