Criss
Not because he had to. Because the mornings were good.
Steph sprawled across three-quarters of the bed with her leg thrown over his hip and her face buried in the pillow, the field journal she'd fallen asleep reading still open on the nightstand.
Coffee in the kitchen that he'd learned to make properly because she'd threatened divorce over the old method.
The walk across the yard to Kieran's house where Sage would be waiting at the window to wave at him, because that was their routine now and routines, it turned out, weren't cages. They were architecture.
The dig was in its final phase. Steph had spent seven months translating every inscription in the chamber, cross-referencing the pictographic history with Rydan's recovered records, and building a document so comprehensive that three universities had already requested access.
The council had approved a publication framework that protected living families while restoring the erased ones to the record.
The Brennan name. The Volkov line. The Tanaka branch.
All of them carved back into Hollow Oak's official history, present tense, as if they'd never been gone.
Because they hadn't been. The stone had remembered them when nobody else would.
Steph's work had been submitted to the International Council of Supernatural Archaeological Preservation two weeks ago.
The peer review process would take months, but the preliminary response had been, in Steph's carefully understated words, "encouraging.
" She'd read the letter once, set it on the table, and gone back to her translations without comment.
He'd found her grinning at the wall twenty minutes later when she thought he wasn't looking.
Tonight, though. Tonight was his.
They were on the cabin porch, the small guest cabin that had been temporary and was now just home, cramped and familiar and smelling like her herbs and his sawdust. The evening was warm, late autumn sliding toward the first cool edge of winter, the sky above the pines streaked with orange and purple.
Steph sat cross-legged in the porch chair with a mug of tea balanced on her knee, her dark curls loose, the claiming scar visible above the collar of her flannel.
His flannel. She'd stopped pretending her clothes and his clothes were separate categories around month three.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"Dangerous."
"About timing. For a family." She said it the way she said everything important: directly, without fanfare, eyes on the tree line like she was discussing soil composition.
"Not now. The publication needs to clear review first, and I want to finish the lower chamber translations before I'm too pregnant to fit through the entrance. But soon. Maybe spring."
He took a sip of his coffee and let the word settle. Spring. A baby in spring, in Hollow Oak, with this woman who planned her life in geological timelines and field seasons and had just slotted a child into her schedule somewhere between peer review and a chamber she'd spent seven months decoding.
"Spring works," he said.
"You're not going to make a big deal about this?"
"You just told me you want to have my baby. What part of my face looks like I'm not making a big deal about it?"
She glanced at him. Whatever she saw made her smile. "You look like you’re trying very hard to be casual."
"I'm extremely casual. I'm the most casual person who's ever discussed reproduction on a porch."
"Your hands are shaking."
"It's cold."
"It's sixty-five degrees."
He set his coffee down and looked at her.
Hazel eyes, gold flecks, the particular sharpness of a woman who knew exactly what she'd just said and was enjoying watching it land.
She was smiling. Not the guarded, almost-smile he'd spent weeks earning at the beginning.
A real one. Open, warm, belonging to a woman who'd stopped fighting the good things and started building with them.
"Spring," he said. "I'd like that."
"Good." She picked up her tea. "Now, what's the surprise? You've been twitchy since lunch and you smell like sawdust, which means you've been building something. You only get this particular brand of nervous when you're about to show me something you made."
"I'm not nervous."
"Criss."
"Fine. Come with me."
He drove them north on the road past Kieran's property, deeper into the woods where the old-growth pines gave way to a clearing he'd found eight months ago during a ward check and hadn't been able to stop thinking about since.
The road turned to gravel, then to packed earth, and Steph watched the trees pass.
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see."
"I don't like surprises."
"You'll like this one."
The truck crested a low rise and the clearing opened up below them, ringed by oaks, a creek running along the eastern edge. And in the center, lit by the last amber light of evening, sat their house.
Steph went still.
It was a cabin, because this was Hollow Oak and anything else would have been wrong.
Single story, wide porch, built from timber he'd sourced from the property with Kieran's help and milled at Luka's shop.
Three bedrooms, because spring was coming and he believed her when she said soon.
A stone chimney that he'd laid himself, crooked in one spot where he'd miscounted the mortar line, but solid.
The porch faced west toward the sunset, and the windows were large, larger than standard, because he'd noticed that Steph gravitated toward light the way other people gravitated toward warmth.
"Criss." Her voice was quiet. "What is this?"
"Ours. If you want it."
She got out of the truck before he'd killed the engine.
He followed her up the porch steps, through the front door he'd hung last week, into the main room where the woodstove sat against the far wall and the kitchen opened to the right, all of it smelling like fresh-cut pine and the linseed oil he'd used on the floors.
She moved through the rooms without speaking.
The master bedroom with its view of the creek.
The second bedroom, empty, waiting. The third, smaller, south-facing, warm.
The bathroom with the oversized tub he'd installed because she took baths that lasted an hour and used all the hot water without apology.
Then she reached the kitchen, and she stopped.
The desk sat in the corner by the largest window, where the morning light would fall across the surface for six hours straight.
He'd built it from reclaimed oak, sanded smooth, deep enough for her journals and her camera equipment and the magnetometer she kept within arm's reach even when she was eating breakfast. The chair was sturdy, cushioned, angled so she could look up from her work and see the forest stretching out below the ridge through glass that ran nearly floor to ceiling.
She pressed her fingers to the desk's surface.
Ran them along the grain, the way she touched stone when she was reading what was underneath.
Then she looked out the window at the view he'd chosen for her, the oaks and the creek and the ridge where the chamber sat protected and permanent, her life's work visible from the place where she'd do the rest of it.
She didn't say anything for a long time.
"You built me a desk," she said finally.
"I built you a house. The desk was the important part."
She turned to him. Her eyes were bright, the gold vivid in the evening light that poured through the window behind her. She was wearing his flannel and her field boots and her hair was a mess and she was crying, which she would deny later.
"It's perfect," she said. "All of it. The house, the windows, this." She pressed her palm on the desk. "How long have you been building this?"
"Since the week after the wedding. Kieran helped with the framing. Luka did the chimney consultation, though I laid every stone. Freya picked the window placements." He leaned against the kitchen counter. "I wanted it done before you finished the dig. So you'd have somewhere to write the book."
"What book?"
"The one you're going to write. About the site, the families, the history.
The one that makes sure nobody ever buries that story again.
" He crossed to her and took her hand, the one with the emerald ring, and held it.
"You need a place to do that. Not a cramped guest cabin.
Not a desk at the inn. Your own space, with your own light, in a house that belongs to us. "
She laced her fingers through his and looked around the kitchen, the main room, the porch visible through the front windows where the evening light was fading to violet.
The house was quiet the way new houses are, still absorbing the presence of the people who'd live in it, the wood settling, the spaces waiting to be filled with the particular noise of a life built on purpose.
"Move in this weekend?" he asked.
"Tomorrow."
"The floors aren't finished in the second bedroom."
"I don't care. Tomorrow." She pulled him toward her by the hand and kissed him in the kitchen of their house, slow and warm, the desk he'd built behind her and the forest he'd chosen for her outside the window and the future they'd agreed on settling into the walls around them.
When she pulled back, her forehead rested against his chin and her hands were fisted in his shirt and she was laughing, quiet and bright, the sound filling the empty kitchen and making it home.
"Criss Holt," she said. "You built me a desk by a window."
"Yeah."
"That might be the most romantic thing anyone's ever done."
"I also built you a house."
"The desk is better." She kissed him again. "The desk is everything."
They stood in the kitchen while the last light drained from the sky and the first stars appeared through the big window and the creek murmured along the property's edge.
The house waited around them, patient, ready.
Three bedrooms. A porch facing west. A desk by the biggest window, built from oak, sanded smooth, positioned in the exact spot where the morning light would find her.
He'd lived his whole life without a plan. Now he had one.
Her. This house. The truth, preserved. A family, in spring.
It was more than enough.
It was home.