26. Happily Ever After
Chapter twenty-six
Happily Ever After
Laney
Iwake up at four in the morning.
Not the alarm. Not the ranch. Just awake, completely, the way you wake up when something is happening that your body understood before your brain caught up to it.
I lie in the dark for a moment.
Beckett is asleep beside me, one arm loose across my waist, breathing deep, completely unguarded the way he only is when he's sleeping. I look at him for a moment in the dark. At the ring on my finger catching what little light there is.
Then I get up carefully so I don't wake him.
June slipped the test into my jacket pocket last night with the efficiency of a woman who had driven to the pharmacy while Beckett was talking to Earl about bread rolls and somehow made it back before the conversation ended.
She didn't say anything when she handed it to me. Just pressed it into my hand with her eyes doing everything that needed doing and walked back to the party like nothing happened.
June Calloway is the best person I know.
The ranch house bathroom is down the hall.
I close the door quietly behind me, turn on the light, stand in my socks and sleep shirt and open the box.
I follow the instructions the same way I follow everything else, directly, without overthinking.
Set it on the edge of the sink. Look at the ceiling and breathe.
Three minutes. I count them.
I think about the engagement party. The string lights in the oak tree. Maisie on her crate saying you fixed the missing kind for both of us. Beckett's hands holding mine in the south pasture dark. Ask me tomorrow morning delivered with that layered smile.
Tomorrow morning is now.
I look at the test.
Two lines.
I stand in the ranch house bathroom at four in the morning in my socks with two lines and the full enormous weight of it sitting in my chest. Alongside the ring on my finger. Alongside four months of Silver Mesa. Alongside thirty-three years of being careful.
Oh.
Oh this is something. I sit on the edge of the bathtub.
Not because my legs have given out, just because sitting feels like the right response to information this large. I let the reality move through me slowly, all the way through, the way I've learned to let real things move through me instead of filing them somewhere safer.
A baby.
Beckett's baby.
A sibling for Maisie who already has turquoise boots, a notepad full of plans, the absolute certainty that Silver Mesa is where everyone belongs.
I look at the ring on my finger.
At the two lines.
I start to cry.
Not the managed kind. Not the kind that arrives with an apology and gets put away quickly.
The full kind, the kind that comes from somewhere so deep and long held that it arrives with everything attached.
Every careful year. Every door left ajar just in case.
Every, not yet. Every fear that good things leave.
They don't always leave.
Sometimes they stay.
Sometimes they multiply.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub and cry the best cry of my thirty three years and when I'm done I wash my face and look at myself in the mirror.
The woman looking back is not the woman who stood at the Silver Mesa gate almost five years ago with her arms crossed, her heart locked down, and a very reliable system for not wanting too much.
She is now someone considerably braver.
She earned it.
I pick up the test.
Open the bathroom door.
Walk quietly down the hall.
Beckett is still asleep, his face unguarded, his arm still reaching across the space where I was.
I stand in the doorway and look at him and think about waking him up right now and telling him everything.
I think about the porch instead.
Coffee first, then forever.
The coffee is ready by five.
I make it the way I always make it, two cups, the same way Beckett started making two cups somewhere in the early weeks without discussing it and the habit transferred between us so naturally that neither of us could say exactly when it happened.
I take both cups to the front porch.
The ranch is still dark. The hill line invisible against the pre-dawn sky, the barn a quiet shape, the string lights from last night still glowing faintly in the oak tree at the creek bend because nobody turned them off.
Nobody is going to turn them off for a while either. They're too good to lose yet.
I sit in my chair.
Hold both cups.
Look at the ranch in the dark.
The test is in my shirt pocket.
I've been carrying it long enough for the reality to settle in a little, and it still feels like the most significant thing I've ever put in a pocket.
Which is saying something given that I once carried a colic emergency protocol and a fence repair invoice in the same pocket on the worst Tuesday of the year.
The front door opens at five-twenty.
Beckett comes through it with his hat already on and his boots on and the expression of a man who reached across the bed, found nothing, and has been moving toward the porch ever since. He stops when he sees me. Looks at the two cups in my hands.
Looks at my face.
He knows my faces.
I can tell because his expression shifts immediately into the careful, attentive version of himself that means he has registered something and is giving it space.
He sits in his chair.
I hand him a coffee.
He takes it without looking away from me.
We sit for a moment in the pre-dawn quiet. The ranch breathing around us, the string lights still on, the first birds starting somewhere in the oak tree line. Normal Sunday morning at Silver Mesa.
Absolutely nothing normal about this Sunday morning.
"You've been up a while," he says quietly.
"Since four."
"You okay?"
I look at my coffee. Look at the ranch. Look at him in the early dark with his hat and his steady eyes and the ring he put on my finger twelve hours ago at an oak tree in the south pasture.
I reach into my shirt pocket.
Take out the test.
Hold it out across the space between our chairs.
He looks at it.
Takes it from my hand slowly.
Looks at the two lines in the pre-dawn light, turning it slightly, making sure he's reading it correctly. He is reading it correctly. There is nothing ambiguous about two lines.
The porch is very quiet.
He looks up at me.
His expression does something I have never seen it do before in all the time I've spent learning every expression he has.
It moves through several things very fast, surprise, calculation, something that is trying to be composed, landing on something so open and unguarded and enormous that the composure never really arrives.
His eyes are bright.
Beckett Wilder, who walked into board rooms and hostile takeovers and one shareholder meeting where someone threw a water bottle. Who held a fence line in a flash flood and cantered a horse in front of the whole town.
"Laney?" His voice is not entirely steady.
"Yeah," I say softly.
He looks at the test.
Looks at the ring on my finger.
Looks at the ranch in the early dark around us.
"We're having a baby," he says. Not a question. Just the true thing.
Said plain and steady, the way he says all true things.
"We're having a baby," I confirm.
He sets the coffee down on the porch rail. Reaches across the space between our chairs. Takes both my hands in his and holds them with the steady certain grip of a man who has decided where he is and is not going anywhere. He leans in and kisses me on the lips. He says I love you so much.
We sit like that in the pre-dawn dark while Silver Mesa wakes up around us and the string lights glow and the hill line starts its slow transition from black to gray to the first pale gold of morning.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
We don't need to.
Maisie finds out at breakfast.
Not because we planned to tell her at breakfast specifically. Because Maisie comes downstairs at seven-thirty with her hair in lopsided braids and her turquoise boots already on and finds us at the kitchen table now.
We are holding hands across it with the expression of two people sitting inside something enormous. She stops in the doorway and reads the room in approximately four seconds.
She looks at our hands. Looks at our faces.
Looks at the test sitting on the table between the coffee cups because neither of us moved it.
She looks at the test for a long moment. Looks at me.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asks.
Beckett and I look at each other.
"Depends what you think it is," he says carefully.
She walks to the table. Picks up the test with both hands. Examines it with the focused scientific attention she brings to things she's trying to understand. Sets it back down.
"I'm going to be a big sister," she says.
Not a question, a verdict.
Delivered with the calm, certain authority of someone who has been the only child for eight years. Someone who had apparently already made her peace with the amendment before anyone told her it was coming.
Beckett looks at her. "How do you feel about that?"
She thinks about it honestly the way she thinks about everything important. Takes her time. Sits down at the table with us and puts her chin in her hands and looks at the test and then at the window and then at the ranch outside it.
"I feel good about it," she says finally. "I've been practicing."
I look at her. "Practicing what."
"Being a big sister." She says it like this is obvious. "I've been bossing Remy around for four months already. That's basically the same skill set."
Beckett makes a sound that is not a laugh and absolutely is a laugh.
I press my lips together.
"Remy is going to be so excited," she says, moving on with the organizational energy of someone who has already begun planning.
"Can I tell him? I want to tell him. He's going to make it weird but in a good way.
" She looks at Beckett. "Silas will just nod but it'll be a really meaningful nod.
" She looks at me. "June already knows, doesn't she. "
I look at the table.