Chapter Sixteen #2
“You can be a grandmother,” I said, the words coming out before I could stop them. “If you want to do it right. No conditions, no rewriting history, no pretending any of this is something it isn’t. Just you, as you are, meeting this child exactly where they are.”
“I do,” she said immediately. “I want that. I want to do it right.”
I nodded and went back to checking the rootstock, my hands moving through the familiar sequence without requiring my full attention. The vine under my fingers was healthy—new growth coming in strong, no sign of the softness that meant rot setting in at the base.
Behind me, my mother stayed at the end of the row for a while after that, not talking, not moving closer, just present—her attention both strange and familiar after thirty years of the careful distance we’d maintained.
I let her stay. Not because I owed it to her, not because the alternative was too complicated to manage, but because the truth of who she was—who she had always been, underneath the performance my father had required—was worth more than whatever came next.
* * * *
By late afternoon, my parents’ sedan had finally disappeared down the gravel drive, the dust from its tires hanging in the still air long after the car itself was out of sight.
I stood on the porch with my hands wrapped around nothing, watching the way the light changed as it moved across the valley—gold to amber to the deep purple that meant sunset wasn’t far off.
The baby had been quiet all day—settled somewhere low and central, the weight of it both strange and familiar against the inside of my skin.
I rested one hand against the curve of my stomach without having decided to put it there, feeling the pressure that meant growth rather than trouble.
The porch boards creaked behind me—not the careful, quiet sound of someone trying not to be heard, but the weight of a body that knew exactly how much space it occupied.
Cruz came up the steps and stopped beside me, close enough that our shoulders were almost touching but not quite.
He didn’t ask how it went with my parents.
Didn’t mention the morning’s confrontation or the hour I’d spent in the greenhouse with my mother or everything that had shifted between us in the past twenty-four hours.
He just moved to the second chair and sat down. He set a mug of coffee on the armrest within my reach, steam rising from it in a straight line that thinned as it reached the evening air. Then he turned to face the valley, his profile to me, and went completely still.
I stood for another moment, watching the easy set of his shoulders—not quite rigid, not quite relaxed, the careful control that meant he was working hard to keep himself together.
Then I picked up the mug and sat down beside him, close enough that our arms were touching but not quite holding, the distance that had become our default.
We watched the light go gold on the greenhouse glass and the mountains start their slow fade to blue without either of us saying anything for a stretch long enough that it should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t.
“My father,” I said eventually, the words coming out before I could stop them. “He’s never going to come around. Not really. Not in a way that matters.”
“I know,” Cruz said, his voice level.
“My mother might,” I continued. “Given time. Given the chance to figure out who she is when she’s not performing for him.”
“That’s worth something,” Cruz said.
I turned the mug in both hands, feeling the weight of it under my fingers—heavy ceramic, no handle, the kind of thing that wouldn’t break if you dropped it.
“I spent thirty years thinking I knew exactly who I was,” I said, the words coming out quietly.
“Alpha. SEAL. The kind of man who could handle whatever came at him because that’s what I’d been built for. ”
Cruz stayed perfectly still beside me, his eyes on the valley rather than my face.
“I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the version of myself that is sitting on this porch,” I continued. “Pregnant. With a man who jumped out of a plane in the dark to come home to me.”
Cruz was quiet for a beat—the silence that meant he was making a calculation, weighing risks against benefits, deciding exactly how much of himself to put on the line.
Then he said, “You could start by admitting it’s home.”
The words landed between us like something with weight—not quite physical, but present enough that I had to look down at the mug in my hands to hide whatever had just happened to my face.
I didn’t answer right away. Looked at the valley instead—at the greenhouse glass catching the last of the afternoon light, at the mountains going blue in the distance, at the sweep of land that had belonged to me for just a few months, but somehow felt like it had always been mine.
Then I said, “Yeah.” Just that. One syllable. Cruz’s hand settled over mine on the armrest of the chair—warm and callused and exactly the right size to make mine look smaller by comparison. I turned my palm up and let him, feeling the pressure of his fingers against my skin.
We stayed like that while the light finished going out of the sky—gold to amber to the deep purple that meant full dark wasn’t far off. The baby moved once against my palm—a small, insistent pressure that meant growth rather than trouble—and I pressed back gently, the way the doctor had shown me.
Then, from inside the house, Cruz’s phone rang—the specific tone that meant Sterling, not the general ring that came for everyone else.
Cruz got up with careful attention, squeezing my hand once before letting go. “I should get that,” he said, his voice level.
I nodded, understanding without being told that Sterling didn’t call unless something was happening—the sound of “operational” rather than “social” suddenly too present to ignore.
Cruz went inside, pulling the door mostly shut behind him. I stayed on the porch, watching the last of the light fade from the valley, feeling that whatever was happening inside the house was suddenly too present to ignore.
After a minute, I could hear Cruz’s voice through the door change register: clipped, operational, the tight syllables that meant the call was not routine.
I got up from the chair and moved to the hallway just inside the door, close enough to hear without being in the room. Not quite eavesdropping, not quite respecting privacy, just the listening for the difference between “this is fine” and “we have a problem.”
“—not a cleanup operation,” Cruz was saying, his voice carrying through the half-open door. “Different cell. Different approach pattern. They’re running a separate team, not connected to the Istanbul network.”
A pause while Sterling said something I couldn’t quite make out.
“Three weeks, minimum,” Cruz replied. “Maybe longer, depending on how many leads they’ve got and how deep the network runs.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“I understand the timeline,” Cruz said, his voice going flat as if he was working hard to keep himself together. “I’ll be ready to move at 0600.”
I stood in the hallway with one hand resting low against my stomach, listening to Cruz’s voice go flat and focused on the other side of the door, and understood that the thing we had just settled on the porch was about to meet the first real test of whether it held.
Not a cleanup operation. Not a loose thread from the Peterson network. Something new. Something that would require Cruz specifically. Something that was not a short assignment.
The kind of call that came with “this is what I do” rather than “this is who I am”—the difference between the job and the man suddenly too present to ignore.
I moved back to the porch without Cruz hearing me, sat down in the chair with careful attention, and watched the last of the light fade from the valley. The baby moved again—another roll, stronger this time.
I sat on the porch with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on the dark valley, and tried to make sense of what was happening. Behind me, through the kitchen window, Cruz moved around preparing for whatever came next—something he’d done it a hundred times before.
The perimeter wasn’t alarmed. The system wasn’t triggering. And somewhere in the three weeks since Cruz had walked through my front door, I’d stopped wanting it to.
Now, I was terrified I’d need it back.