Chapter Eighteen
~ Mitch ~
I stood in the bunkhouse bathroom doorway at six in the morning with one sock on and my brain doing math it had no business doing this early, watching my brother brace himself over the toilet bowl like the porcelain was the only thing keeping him on the planet.
The tile floor was cold under my bare foot.
The small frosted window let in a thin, grudging light that made everything look half-hearted, including Caleb’s complexion, which was doing something between paper and paste that I had been noticing for approximately a week and had decided, incorrectly, not to mention.
He made a sound that belonged in a horror movie and not in my bathroom at six in the morning. I leaned against the door frame. “You’ve been off your food for a week,” I said.
Caleb wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes were closed. “I don’t want to hear whatever you’re about to say.”
“Bone-deep exhaustion that sleep hasn’t touched.”
“Stop.”
“Tuesday’s eggs went back to the kitchen untouched.”
“Mitchell.” There was a warning in his tone.
I ignored it.
“Wednesday’s coffee. You made it, set it down, stared at it for three minutes like it had personally offended you, and walked away.”
Caleb’s shoulders tensed. His fingers were white around the bowl. The wood stove downstairs ticked its steady rhythm, counting seconds the way it counted everything, patient and entirely unconcerned with whether my brother was currently trying to turn his stomach inside out.
I said it anyway. “Pregnancy.”
The word dropped into the small tiled bathroom like something with physical weight.
Caleb went completely still. His breathing stopped for one full beat, then two, and then he sat back on his heels and looked up at me with an expression I had seen exactly three times in twenty-four years of shared DNA, and every single time it meant the ground was shifting under his feet and he was deciding whether to stand or fall.
Terror first. Raw, unfiltered, the kind of terror that lived in his eyes before it reached his mouth.
Then something else came up behind it—something bright and barely contained, the look of a man whose entire world had just rearranged itself in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and he was not prepared for how much he wanted the new arrangement.
He swallowed. “You can’t just say that.”
“I just did.”
“I could have food poisoning.”
“You’ve had food poisoning. This isn’t food poisoning.”
“How do you know what food poisoning looks like?”
“Because you had it in Helena and threw up on my shoes, and these are different shoes, and also you’re not throwing up on them right now. You’re sitting on the floor having a theological experience about whether you’re allowed to be happy about this.”
Caleb stared at me. His hazel eyes caught the thin light through the frosted window and held it, and the contradiction in his face—the fear and the brightness, wrestling in real time—was something I filed under its own category: Beautiful and Extremely My Problem.
I crossed the bathroom and sat down on the cold tile beside him without ceremony.
The tile was objectively miserable. Cold seeped through my jeans immediately, which was not how I had planned to spend my Tuesday morning, but planning had gone out the window approximately two minutes after I heard the retching.
My arm went around his shoulders. Caleb leaned into it, his weight warm against my side, and we sat there in the kind of quiet that only brothers who had shared foster homes and bathrooms and the back seat of a truck for twenty-four years could sit in.
The bunkhouse creaked around us.
Sterling was still asleep on the other side of the wall, which was its own kind of miracle, and I was going to let him sleep through this shocking revelation because some men deserved a good morning before their entire life got turned upside down by twin-induced nausea.
“We should find out for sure before we say anything to anyone,” I said.
Quiet. The kind of quiet I deployed approximately twice a year, usually when someone was bleeding or the bills were late or my brother was sitting on a bathroom floor looking at him like the world had just opened up and he wasn’t sure he was allowed to step through.
Caleb’s voice was steady. “Obviously.”
The word carried great emphasis. Great emphasis and great history, and I knew exactly what was coming because Caleb had a documented list and he was about to read from it.
“The sourdough starter,” he said. “You told Burke about it before it had a name.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“I was excited. Burke was standing there. The moment had energy.”
“It was a jar of flour and water.”
“It was potential.”
Caleb’s eyebrow went up. “Rawley knows about the goat documentary.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“You cried during the goat documentary.”
“I was moved. The goat had a journey.”
“The goat was named Gary and he found a friend. That’s the entire plot.”
“Gary’s journey was emotional. Objectively emotional. I stand by it.”
Caleb took a breath. “And Sterling.”
I winced. “That was strategically useful.”
“You told him I named the sourdough starter after him.”
“It worked, didn’t it? He’s in the bed. The bed I bought. The very expensive bed that he said was ‘acceptable’ after using it one night.”
Caleb’s expression did not change. The stare was level, warm, and completely unconvinced. Twenty-four years of Mitch excuses had built up a specific immunity in my brother’s face, and I was watching it activate in real time.
“Promise me,” he said.
“I promise.”
He kept staring.
“I promise on the hat.”
Caleb’s expression shifted. His eyes went to the hat sitting on the bathroom counter where I’d left it last night, the tan cowboy hat that had been on my head through three states, two blown transmissions, and one extremely ill-advised attempt to ride a mechanical bull.
The hat was sacred. The hat was non-negotiable. The hat was the only thing I owned that had never betrayed me, and Caleb knew it.
“That,” he said, “is the first thing you’ve ever said that I actually believe.”
He stood up. Brushed off his pajama pants. His hands were steady, which was impressive given that approximately ninety seconds ago he’d been revisiting Tuesday’s dinner with the toilet bowl’s full cooperation.
The thin morning light caught the side of his face, turning his strawberry blond hair gold at the edges, and the expression he wore now was pure, unfiltered Caleb: warm and stubborn and already six steps ahead of whatever came next.
I stayed on the cold tile a moment longer.
My sock was still missing. The wood stove kept ticking.
Sterling slept on the other side of the wall, unaware that his entire life was about to acquire dimensions he had not authorized and would not be allowed to refuse, and the responsibility of being the one who had to tell him settled into my chest with a weight that was familiar and entirely new at the same time.
I was going to need a better promise than the hat.
I stood up. Found my sock under the sink.
Pulled it on. The tile was still cold. The morning was still early.
The world had rearranged itself in the space of one word, and I, who had spent twenty-four years being the one who held things together, was now holding something that had no instruction manual and at least two very small, very real heartbeats attached to it.
I looked at my brother. He was washing his hands at the sink, his reflection in the small mirror calm and certain in a way that made my chest do something complicated.
“We’re telling him today,” I said.
Caleb dried his hands on the towel. “After we know for sure.”
“Obviously.”
He smiled. The kind of smile that lived in his eyes first and reached his mouth second, warm and certain and entirely without pretence. The kind of smile that said I trust you even though I absolutely should not.
The weight of that trust settled into my chest alongside everything else, permanent and warm and exactly what I had been building toward since the first week we arrived at this ranch with nothing but two backpacks and a determination to finally, actually stay.
I picked up my hat. Set it on my head where it belonged.
* * * *
Sterling sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and his maps and the particular expression of a man who had slept better than expected and was mildly suspicious about it.
The wood stove ticked behind him. Morning light cut through the east window in a clean gold line that hit the salt shaker and the edge of his mug and nothing useful, which was typical of morning light and also Sterling’s relationship with convenience.
I leaned against the counter. Caleb stood by the sink washing a mug that was already clean, which was Caleb’s version of casual and also the least casual thing I had ever seen in my life.
“We need feed supplies,” I said.
Sterling didn’t look up from his map. “Miller’s doesn’t open until nine.”
“We’ll wait.”
That got his attention. His dark green gaze came up, did the full sweep—me first, then Caleb, then back to me—and I held eye contact and thought about absolutely nothing, which is significantly harder than it sounds when the man across the table from you has survived Tbilisi and makes his living reading rooms for concealed weapons and emotional tells.
Caleb smiled. It was a very normal smile.
It was possibly the most suspicious normal smile in the history of human faces, the kind of smile that said I am being extremely truthful about something completely untrue, and if Sterling didn’t see through it immediately then his operational training had a critical gap that I was absolutely going to exploit.
Sterling’s eyes narrowed. “You two are doing something.”
“We’re getting feed supplies,” I said.
“Miller’s has a phone.”
“We like the drive.”