Chapter Nine #2
One minute I was looking at shades of blue-green, and the next I was standing in my kitchen with a brush fan of color samples in my hand, understanding without drama that I was keeping this child. That the question of whether had never actually been a question at all.
The paint became furniture. The furniture became a crib ordered online and assembled at two in the morning when sleep wouldn’t come.
A bassinet for beside my bed. A rocking chair with a worn arm, the wood smooth from years of someone else’s hands.
A dresser with small brass drawer pulls shaped like acorns.
A toy box. Shelves stocked with soft things in greens and yellows and warm neutrals—blankets and stuffed animals and the small clothes that made the whole thing real in ways the ultrasound image still didn’t.
The room had been ready for weeks. Had been waiting, empty and full at once, while I tried to figure out how to tell the other person who belonged in it.
Dr. Marsh had helped with that—or was helping, anyway. One session a week in her office above the bookstore in town, forty-five minutes of carefully structured conversation about things I’d spent thirty years not examining.
She was practical, Dr. Marsh. No-nonsense. The kind of woman who listened more than she talked and who framed the omega designation not as a crisis of identity, but as a correction of information.
“You’re still the person you were before the blood-work,” she’d told me in our third session. “You still run your land the same way. You still make decisions the same way. The omega label explains some things without replacing you with someone else.”
I was working on believing that. Some days it came easier than others.
What came less easily was thinking about my parents—the tests they’d run when I was young, the documents they’d shown me, the certainty they’d handed me that someone had deliberately constructed.
My father’s rigid, macho masculinity wasn’t hard to read as motive.
The man who’d taught me to shoot before I could read, who’d checked my posture at the dinner table, who’d made sure I knew exactly what was expected of the Reyes men—he’d have seen an omega son as a failure before I’d even had a chance to begin.
The irony of it sat in my chest like something with an edge—that my father had hidden my omega status to protect a heterosexual future that was never going to happen anyway.
That he’d built thirty years of lies around an identity crisis that wasn’t one, because I’d figured out I was gay at fourteen and had never once connected it to the tests or the results or the absolute certainty that had shaped my understanding of myself.
I hadn’t called them. Didn’t know yet if I would.
The baby would be here in three months, a fact that existed in its own category, separate from whether my parents knew about it or approved of it or had anything useful to say about a situation they’d spent thirty years making sure would never happen.
I stayed on the porch as the morning stretched toward noon, one hand on my stomach, the baby quiet now, settled into whatever rhythm made sense at twelve weeks.
The valley spread out in front of me, mountains to the east, pasture to the west, the greenhouse glass catching the late-morning light below.
Somewhere in the world, Cruz was headed home—back to Montana, back to the ranch, back to whatever came next. I watched the light move across the valley and tried to figure out how to tell him that everything he thought he knew was about to change.
The afternoon ran on its schedule the way I’d built it to. Lunch at noon—a sandwich and an apple eaten at the kitchen counter while standing because sitting down meant getting back up again, and my back had other ideas about that movement.
Then the one o’clock nap without exception, the fatigue that the pregnancy manual called normal and that I called inconvenient as hell.
I’d fought it at first—had pushed through the bone-deep weariness that hit like clockwork every afternoon, had kept working until my hands started shaking and my vision blurred at the edges.
Then Jasper had sat me down at the kitchen table, had looked me in the eye with the same focus he brought to medical problems, and had said, “Your body is building a nervous system, Jackson. That takes energy. More energy than you’ve ever needed for anything else.
You can either schedule a nap or your body will schedule one for you, and trust me, you’ll like its timing even less. ”
So, now I napped. Every day, one to two, like it was written into my contract. Sometimes I slept, sometimes I just lay there with my eyes closed and my mind running through the hundred things that still needed doing, but either way, I stayed horizontal for exactly sixty minutes.
Today I’d actually slept—had dropped off the moment my head hit the pillow, had sunk into the kind of deep, dreamless state that left me disoriented when I woke.
I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling and trying to place myself in the timeline of the day, then pushed myself upright with careful movements.
My back protested—a dull ache that had taken up residence at the base of my spine somewhere around week ten and showed no signs of leaving—but held.
I’d gotten used to it, the same way I’d gotten used to the fatigue and the food aversions and the inconvenient way my center of gravity seemed to shift by the hour.
Not comfortable, but familiar.
Manageable.
The clock on the nightstand read 2:15. I’d overslept by fifteen minutes, which meant the afternoon routine was already running behind.
I made it to the kitchen window in time to see the Pruett brothers moving between the second and third greenhouse with a wheelbarrow.
They worked with the same efficiency of men who’d done the same job a hundred times before—Caleb steering, Mitch loading, both of them talking without looking at each other, the kind of conversation that required no visual cues.
They’d been a godsend.
I watched them for another minute, then turned away from the window and started on dinner prep. Early, but it gave my hands something to do, and right now I needed that more than I needed to stick to the schedule.
The nausea had mostly stayed gone since week ten, as long as I ate on schedule and kept it simple.
Tonight it was roasted chicken thighs—protein, the pregnancy guide had emphasized, protein at every meal—with root vegetables and bread from the bakery in town.
Nothing that required standing at the stove for more than five minutes at a stretch, nothing that would set off the sensitivity that had me running for the bathroom at the smell of coffee or eggs or the protein shakes I’d lived on for ten years.
I moved through the kitchen with practiced efficiency—chicken from the refrigerator, vegetables from the basket by the sink, olive oil and salt and the blend of herbs Decker had brought over last week with careful instructions about not overdoing it.
My body knew the routine even when my mind was elsewhere, which was most of the time these days.
Hands finding the right drawer without looking, feet carrying me from refrigerator to counter to stove without conscious direction.
The kind of movement that came from doing the same thing in the same space day after day.
I passed the wine rack on my way to the pantry, the way I passed it every day, and kept walking. The grapes in the vineyard wouldn’t be ready for harvest for months.
The starter trays in the greenhouse were just beginning to show their first true leaves, the plants still too young to tell if they’d take to Montana soil the way the Belize variety was supposed to.
I had time on that front. Months of it, before the first pressing, before the first bottling, before the first taste of wine made from grapes I’d planted with my own hands on land I’d chosen specifically for the purpose.
I didn’t have much time on the other front.
Tomorrow, if Rawley’s timeline was right.
Tomorrow, Cruz would be back at the ranch, would make his way to the farmhouse the way he always did, would knock on the door with that combination of certainty and care that had caught me off guard the first time and still did, six months later.
Tomorrow, the conversation I’d spent six weeks unable to figure out how to start would start itself, whether I was ready or not.
By the time the chicken was in the oven and the light outside had gone gold and low, I was standing at the kitchen counter with one hand resting on my stomach again.
I hadn’t put it there on purpose—it just ended up there, the way it did a dozen times a day now, drawn to the curve that hadn’t existed three months ago and now seemed like it had always been part of me.
The baby moved, that same small, insistent pressure, a roll rather than a kick this time. I stood very still in the quiet of the kitchen, one hand on the counter, the other on my stomach, and watched the light change outside the window.
Cruz was coming home. He would come to the farmhouse because he always came to the farmhouse. Would knock on the door the way he always did. Would stand on the porch with that look in his eyes that I still couldn’t quite read.
And I would have to find the words for what had happened—for the tests and the results and the truth that had been growing inside me for three months without my permission or participation.
Would have to hand him an ultrasound image and a blood-work panel and the complete unraveling of everything he thought he knew.
Or I wouldn’t. Would stand on the porch with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on his face, and would watch him put it together himself—the silence, the avoidance, the way I was standing that made it impossible to miss what was happening.
Either way, it would start tomorrow.
Either way, everything would change.
Somewhere in the world, Cruz was on a plane headed for Montana, for the ranch, for whatever came next.
I stood in the kitchen with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on the darkening valley, and waited for tomorrow to arrive.