Chapter 29 Daisy
DAISY
The phone buzzes against my hip while I'm trying to reach a box of tea on the top shelf, and I almost don't answer because my center of gravity has officially filed a complaint with management. Thirty-eight weeks pregnant means everything is a negotiation: bending, reaching, existing.
But the screen says DAD, and a call from my father in the middle of the working day usually means either news or a really good deal on truck parts he thinks Adam should know about.
"Hey," I answer, wedging the phone between my ear and shoulder. "Everything okay?"
"Your husband came to see me yesterday."
I freeze with my hand still extended toward the tea. "He what?"
"Drove all the way out here. Sat at my kitchen table.
Drank my coffee, which, you know, is not great coffee, but he didn't complain.
" Dad's voice has that gruff warmth it gets when he's trying not to be sentimental about something.
"Said you'd like me to walk you down the aisle at this vow renewal thing. Asked if I'd be up for it."
The tea is completely forgotten now. I lower my arm and press my palm against the counter for balance, because my knees have decided to go unreliable. "He asked you that?"
"He did."
"And you said?"
"I said I'd be honored, Daisy-bell. What did you think I'd say?"
"I also told him," Dad continues, and I can hear the smile in his voice, "that if he makes you cry again, I won't need a lawyer."
"Dad."
"What? It's the truth. I know people."
"You know exactly zero people who would do anything illegal for you." I'm fighting a smile now and losing.
"I know Gary from the bowling league."
"Gary is seventy-four and has a bad hip."
"Gary has connections."
I laugh, and it comes out watery. "You're ridiculous."
"I'm your father. It's my job." He pauses. "You're happy, right? With him?"
The question lands somewhere soft. I think about Adam reading to my belly last night, some article about infant brain development that he found online.
"Yeah, Dad. I'm really happy."
"Good." Another pause. "I wasn't there for the first one. The courthouse thing."
"It was the same day we decided to do it. There wasn't time to—"
"I know. I know, sweetheart. I'm not saying that to make you feel bad. I'm saying—" He clears his throat. "I'm glad I get to be there this time."
By the time we hang up, I've abandoned the tea entirely and I'm sitting on the kitchen floor because standing felt like too much work. That's where Adam finds me ten minutes later, keys still in his hand, looking mildly alarmed.
"Why are you on the floor?"
"Why did you go see my dad?"
He stops. Processes. Has the decency to look slightly sheepish. "He told you."
"He told me." I extend my hand, and Adam pulls me up carefully, steadying me with both hands on my waist once I'm vertical. "You asked him to walk me down the aisle."
"I did."
"I told you I wanted him there. I didn't know you'd go in person."
"I wanted it to be—" He stops, runs a hand through his hair. "I don't know. I wanted him to know I was asking him, not just assuming. After everything with Klaus, with the lawsuit, with all of it, I thought he deserved to be asked properly."
"You're trying to make up for things," I say slowly.
"I'm trying to do better." He cups my face, thumbs brushing my cheekbones. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"One is about guilt. The other is about you."
I don't have a response for that, so I kiss him instead: soft, close-mouthed. I hear you, it says, when words feel too heavy.
When I pull back, he's smiling. "I have something to show you."
"If it's another nursery upgrade, I swear to God—"
"It's not the nursery." He takes my hand. "Tomorrow afternoon. One last thing to finish first."
The next afternoon, he drives us to the house, six blocks from The Margin, a brick two-story we chose together three months ago after looking at fourteen different properties and arguing about closet space and natural light and whether a formal dining room was necessary or pretentious.
We agreed to sell the penthouse, the place where I spent five years feeling like a guest in my own marriage.
I don't want to raise our kid somewhere you were unhappy, he said, and that was that.
We've owned this house for weeks. Moved boxes in, painted the nursery, argued about where to put the couch. But there's one room Adam has kept locked, claiming contractor issues, claiming finishing touches, claiming everything except the truth. He stops in front of that door now. Takes a breath.
"Okay," he says. "Close your eyes."
"Adam."
"Please."
I close my eyes. I hear the door open, feel him guide me forward a few steps, then stop.
"Look."
The reading room is small, maybe ten by twelve, with built-in bookshelves lining three walls and a window seat facing the street, cushioned in deep blue fabric that looks soft enough to sink into.
Late afternoon light streams through the glass, catching dust motes, making the whole space glow. But that's not what stops my breath.
The center shelf (the one at perfect eye level, the one you'd see first walking in) holds my mother's books.
Her battered paperbacks with their blue-ink annotations, the ones Adam carried out of a burning building, most of which have lived in boxes since the fire because I couldn't figure out where they belonged.
They belong here. Beside them, empty space. Waiting.
"I left room," Adam says quietly. "For your notes, too. Whatever you want to add. Notes for the baby, maybe, when they're old enough to understand. Or anything else. Anything that matters."
I can't speak. My hand is pressed against my sternum like I can hold my heart inside my chest, like it might escape otherwise.
"I know it's just a room," he continues, and he sounds nervous again, uncertain in a way Adam Smith never used to sound. "But I wanted you to have a place that was yours. A place where—"
"You sat in it."
He stops. "What?"
I'm looking at the window seat cushion, at the slight depression in the center, the way the fabric has already molded to someone's shape. Someone who sat there more than once. Someone who sat there regularly, long enough to leave a mark.
"You sat in the window seat. You've been reading here."
Adam's quiet for a long moment. "Every night. For the past month, after you fell asleep. I'd come over and—" He shrugs, almost embarrassed. "I wanted to understand why your mother wrote in the margins. What she was thinking. What she wanted you to know."
My mother, who died when I was twenty-four. The spring before I married a stranger to save my father's home and told myself it didn't matter.
"You read her notes."
"All of them." He's watching me carefully, like he's not sure if he's done right or done irreparable harm. "She really loved you, Daisy. Every annotation, she was thinking about you. About what you'd understand, what you'd need to hear someday, what kind of person she hoped you'd become."
I'm crying. I don't mean to be, but I am, and Adam crosses the room in two steps to pull me against his chest, one hand cradling the back of my head.
"Hey. Hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"Don't apologize." My voice is muffled against his shirt. "Don't you dare apologize for this."
"Then why are you crying?"
I pull back enough to look at him, this man I married to protect my father, this man who hurt me with distance and silence and scheduled dinners where he couldn't remember what I'd told him the week before.
This man who built me a reading room and filled it with my mother's words and sat in the window seat every night learning who she was.
"Because you didn't just build me a pretty room." I touch his face, trace the line of his jaw. "You became a reader."
His smile is soft, wondering. "I became a lot of things."
"Like what?"
"Yours." He kisses my forehead. "Actually yours. Not just on paper."
I laugh, wet and shaky. "That's corny."
"You love it."
"I do." I lean up to kiss him properly, and he meets me halfway, gentle because of the belly between us, thorough because he means it. "I really, really do."
The doorbell rings.
Adam pulls back, frowning. "We're not expecting anyone."
"Go check. I want another minute in here."
He kisses my temple and slips out, and I turn back to my mother's books, running my fingers along the familiar spines. The copy of Persuasion she read twice. The poetry collection she annotated with questions she wanted to discuss with me someday. All of it here, all of it home.
From the front hall, I hear the door open. A woman's voice, tearful and familiar.
"Oh, honey. Look at you."
Ingrid.
I make my way out of the reading room and down the hall to find my mother-in-law standing in our entryway, a garment bag draped over her arm, tears already streaming down her face.
"Hello," she manages, and then she's crying too hard to say anything else.