Chapter 54
FRANKIE
A week later, I fly to Minneapolis, nerves rioting. Logan picks me up from the airport in his mother’s SUV. His parents’ house is a short drive from the airport, and before I know it, we’re pulling up in front of a large white house with black shutters.
Logan takes my hand. “I’ll come around and help you out. It’s icy.”
“I’m twelve weeks pregnant, not incapacitated,” I protest.
“Still.” He leaps out of the car and jogs around to the passenger side, unbothered by the supposedly icy conditions.
It is freaking cold, though. It’s been years since I’ve experienced winter like this, and I do not miss it. I don’t think I packed enough base layers.
He opens my door and I brace myself against the arctic bite.
At least the cold distracts from the unknown ahead.
It’s not going to be the worst case scenario you can imagine.
I know that’s true, but there are a lot of not-quite-worst-case-scenarios that I can also imagine.
And it’s actually very hard for me to think of ways that this meeting will go well, because that’s rarely been my experience in life, except at school.
And showing up pregnant after getting drunkenly married to a stranger is pretty far from the persona I had to adopt to do well in my studies.
“Stop overthinking it,” Logan whispers as he opens the front door.
“I just want to make a good impression,” I whisper back.
He gives me a look so fond and sweet, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand how I lucked out with this man. “You will.”
“They’re here!” a woman calls, and then two people about my parents’ age come running into the warm foyer.
Running. Eager to meet me. Slightly out of breath, even.
“We’ve heard so much,” Logan’s dad says.
“Take her coat,” his mom says. “Oh, you’re very pretty indeed, aren’t you?”
“And smart, too,” Logan coaches, his hand firm against my back. Maybe he’s afraid I’ll bolt.
“Yes, we’ve heard how smart you are,” his mom gushes. “Please come in. I’m so happy you’re going to come to the game with us tonight. We’ll have so much time to get to know each other.”
“One thing at a time, Mom. Let’s give Frankie a bit of space. Did you make coffee?”
“Of course, yes, come in to the kitchen.”
At the back of the house is a big great room.
It’s half kitchen, half living room, with large French doors that open to a huge deck, and a backyard beyond that.
There’s a pond in the near distance. Hockey sticks leaning against the deck railing tell me that Logan’s dad skates on that pond, and that’s delightful.
“Frankie, these are my parents, Jeff and Annie Granger. I have told them a lot about you, but, uh, not the most important parts.”
We talked about this. We went back and forth if he should tell them before they meet me or not. But Logan thinks it’s important for them to see how we are together, as we tell them the story at the same time.
Freaking terrifying.
I nod. “It’s so lovely to meet you. I love your son so much, and I have since I met him on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t know that I loved him at first sight, of course, but there was something there and we just clicked. So this meeting has been a long time coming.”
Annie puts coffee on the table, then sits across from us. “Logan says that there’s a reason for the secrecy?”
I swallow around a lump in my throat. “Yeah. It’s a funny small world story, but it turns out that we, uh, had a mutual acquaintance in common in Vegas.”
Logan coughs over acquaintance.
I guess I don’t need to be diplomatic about it. “I’m Frank Wilson’s daughter.”
“Frank…” Annie’s eyes go wide. She looks at Jeff. “Did you know?”
Logan’s dad looks stunned. “No. You’re…” He gestures his hand down toward the floor. “You’re little Frankie Wilson?”
“Do you remember me?” I’m stunned, too.
Logan squeezes my hand. “My dad has a photographic memory for names and faces.”
“Especially hockey-adjacent people. And I just saw your dad not that long ago.”
Annie gives me a funny look, but she doesn’t add anything to that. I wonder if she’s thinking about spending time with my mother. I want to ask how that was, but I can imagine. Very superficial, very nice. Probably no mention of Melissa Wilson’s daughter.
My stomach goes into free fall.
“And the emergency last week?”
“That’s getting ahead of the story a bit.” Logan looks at me. “That night just went on and on.”
His eyes crinkle, and I give him a private smile. We had so much champagne that night, but I remember this from that very first moment, how easy it was to get lost in his eyes. It still is.
“Never wanted it to end, yeah.” I turn back to his parents. “It was a birthday present. That’s how it started. Trying to make Logan’s birthday in Vegas as fun as possible. So we got a unique to Vegas souvenir.”
“A marriage license,” he adds. And it’s really the first time we’ve talked about it out loud since the initial panic of the whole fiasco unfolding.
We both hear how that sounds, and we look at each other again.
His expression is priceless.
“What were we thinking?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Seriously, that was a red flag of the highest order.”
“You just gave me your phone!”
“I don’t even know how much it cost us.”
“Did I make you pay for your own birthday present?”
He leans in, his shoulders shaking. “I don’t remember.”
“Same.” I wipe my eyes. “Oh, man.”
Annie clears her throat.
Jeff makes a questioning, thinking sound. Somewhere between ummm and huh.
“Right.” Logan sobers up. “We got married. That night. Later that night. After a lot of champagne and a good amount of me telling her about you guys.”
“Oh that’s right,” I exclaim. “Jello salads. Church potlucks.”
“Passionfruit,” he adds.
I sigh happily. “Passionfruit.”
Silence settles around the table.
“You got married the night you met?” his mother finally asks.
Of course she’s shocked. Which means now I need to say the other part.
I rip the bandage off as fast as I can. “And I’m pregnant now. That’s what the emergency was last week.”
She stares at me.
“I’m thrilled,” Logan adds. “In case that wasn’t clear. You’re going to be grandparents again.”
“Well at least these two got married first before having a baby,” Jeff says.
“Jeff,” she gasps.
I start to squirm.
This was a mistake.
Logan was wrong to think his parents would understand. I’m twenty-seven years old, about to graduate from medical school, and I’m being judged for getting pregnant right after I got married.
To a stranger.
Heat crawls up my spine and wraps around my throat.
“How was it an emergency?” she asks. “You’re in Los Angeles, right?”
“Yes?” I’m confused. I try to look at Logan, but the hot shame wrapping around my throat and climbing onto my cheeks has me locked in place, having to deal with the confused censure in his mother’s eyes.
“Do you live alone? Were you all alone?”
“No, I have roommates.”
“That’s not the same as a husband, though.” Her brows pull together in an expression so familiar, I suddenly understand that Logan is his mother’s child through and through. “You must have been so scared.”
“Oh.” I gasp in relief. “No. Oh, no, I wasn’t—I mean, I was scared a little, but it wasn’t a pregnancy complication. That wasn’t the emergency. It was that I didn’t know I was pregnant. I just found out, and—” I cut myself short from saying and I was thinking of terminating it.
On the one hand, I’m not ashamed of that choice. On the other, I don’t need to explain it in the context of this moment, when we’ve decided to keep the pregnancy.
Logan shifts so he can wrap his arm around the back of my chair, curling his fingers around my far shoulder.
“It was a surprise, because we’d, uh, been careful.
But apparently not careful enough. And with the time difference, and she was at the hospital, she told me by text message and I had to make a split decision to go with the team to Boston or get on a plane to LA.
Easiest decision of my life. I didn’t know what kind of support Frankie needed, but I knew it needed to be in person. ”
“Of course you did.” Annie takes a deep breath. “Well, this is exciting.”
Exciting?
I blink.
She smiles at me. “I can be a lot. My daughter moved across an international border to get away from me.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Logan mutters.
Annie continues. “Emery had her baby last week and I’ve already been sent home.”
“We’re going back in two weeks,” Jeff adds.
“I’m just warning the girl that she might need to push me away so I don’t smother her.” Annie smiles. “I won’t mind.”
“Yes she will, but there are three other brothers for her to complain to, so it’s fine.” Logan squeezes my shoulder. “But that’s a problem for later.”
I exhale. “Wow. Okay.” I’m reeling, but it’s a good kind of reeling. “Please feel free to smother us. Or at least Logan. I think he loves it.”
He tips his head back and laughs, and I can’t look away. I don’t want to look away. He’s so beautiful, and he was right, his parents are lovely. A lot, but a good kind of a lot.
It takes us a whole hour and two cups of coffee to escape to his childhood bedroom.
“There’s no way I’m going to have a nap before I have to leave for the game,” he says, sitting on his bed.
It is, as promised, covered in a twenty-five-year-old fleece blanket, which he now pats.
“Come here.”
“You’re very proud of yourself, aren’t you?” I climb into his lap, straddling him on the narrow bed.
He slides his hands up my thighs. “Yep.”
I kiss his cheek and then rub my nose in his freshly-trimmed beard. “I wasn’t sure we’d ever get to be alone today.”
“And I have to leave in an hour.” He curves his hands up my back, pressing all of me against all of him. “But tonight I’m going to hold you all night long.”
“Are we sharing this delightful little bed?”
“No, there’s a suite in the basement we can use. That’s actually where I stay when I visit. This is just fulfilling a fantasy of mine.”
“Oh?”
“Mmm. It’s very specific. Your dad never left Minneapolis, we grow up together, you date some version of that Russian shithead, but I intervene at some point and steal you away from him, your heart never gets broken, we make out in this room all the time, and we live happily ever after.”
“That is very specific.”
“I’ve had a lot of time alone with my thoughts.”
“From vengeance fantasies to poetry with our bodies… You have so many layers, Logan Granger.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“You should. You’re very creative.”
“Not at all. Everything I’ve ever said to you that’s poetic has come from observation, not my own mind.”
I giggle. “I dunno, it still feels like you have the soul of a tortured poet. What else did you crib? You told me about the line from The Mist at Dawn’s Edge.”
“I have a list.”
“A list!” I scramble off him, but don’t get far. He tugs me into his side as he pulls out his phone.
And sure enough, in his Notes app is a list labelled Romantic Things to Say to Frankie.
I cannot stop laughing.
“Poetry with our bodies…damn it, I got that one wrong. It was from the menu at the restaurant the first night. Find someone who wants to make poetry with your heart. Which is better than what I said.”
“No. Nothing is better than what you said.”
He puts his phone down and touches his fingertip to my chin. “I want that. I want to be that for you. I want to be whatever you want.”
“You are. You always will be.”