Chapter 1 #2
I want to say it back. I want to mean it the way I used to, simple and whole, without the years of loneliness threaded through every syllable. But my throat is too tight and my heart is too full, so I just nod against his shoulder and hold on.
The eggs go cold in the pan. Neither of us cares.
He follows me to the sink when I finally rescue the pan. The eggs have passed beyond breakfast and become rubber.
"Leave it," he says. "I'll do that. Sit down. What can you eat? Do we have to change what we buy?"
"I've been pregnant all morning without a purchasing strategy," I tell him, scraping at the pan. "Somehow we survived."
"I'm trying to be useful," he says, hovering at my elbow. "I can make toast. Nobody has ever died from my toast."
"You've kept excellent records," I say.
He catches my hand before I reach for the tap and kisses my palm. "Tell me when you first thought. I want to know the whole thing."
"I was late," I say. "Then I spent three days convincing myself I wasn't late enough to count. This morning I decided I was tired of arguing with a calendar."
His thumb stills on my wrist. "Were you scared in there by yourself?"
"For a minute," I admit. "Then the lines appeared and I couldn't think of anything except getting to you."
He looks toward the bathroom, as if he can go back and be there. "Next time, wake me. For any of it. Even if it's three in the morning and you just need someone to stare at the box with you."
"I'm putting that in writing," I tell him. "You become a completely different person when somebody disturbs your sleep."
He grins against my knuckles. "You married me knowing I once told a smoke alarm to come back after seven."
"That was a low point for household leadership," I say.
He laughs into my shoulder. I close my eyes. His laugh hasn't changed. That's almost the cruelest thing about missing someone who still lives here: I know exactly what I could have.
"I don't know how to do this," he says. "I've helped calves into the world. I have a strong suspicion none of that qualifies me for the waiting room."
"Please don't mention any of that to the receptionist," I beg him. "I want them to let us come back."
"I'll leave the boots in the truck if it helps," he offers.
"You can assemble things," I say, counting on my fingers. "You can carry things. And when I tell you I'm frightened, you can listen before you promise there's nothing to be frightened about."
He goes still. "Is that what I do?"
"You like a problem you can fix," I tell him gently. "Sometimes I just want you sitting beside me while it's still a problem."
He pulls out a chair and sits, drawing me down onto his lap. "Start practicing on me. What are you worried about first?"
"That I'm going to love this baby so much I'll become unbearable," I say into his shoulder. "I'll check whether it's breathing every eleven seconds and accidentally turn into one of those mothers who puts a hat on everybody else's children because she feels cold."
"I'll be the father carrying spare hats," he says solemnly. "We'll be avoided at parties."
"We already are," I remind him. "You once explained fence drainage to a woman who was asking where the bathroom was."
"She said she wanted to know how the property was laid out." His grin softens. "Our kid gets you. That's what I keep thinking. Whatever I don't know, whatever I get wrong, they get you for their mother."
"Don't put me in charge of knowing everything," I say. "I read the test instructions twice, and they're mostly pictures."
He presses his mouth to my temple. "We'll read them together. The instructions for all of it."
I touch his jaw. "I need you here for the ordinary parts too. The appointments where nothing happens. The shopping. The days when I'm tired and boring and have no announcement to make."
"I'll come to the appointments," he says. "Tell me when you book the first one."
"I'm telling you because I want us to enjoy this," I say. "I don't want to spend it reminding you that it's happening."
He covers my hand with his. "You won't have to sell me my own child, Molly. I want this. I want you."
I believe that he means it. For now, with his face still damp and his hand warm against my stomach, I let that be enough.
The doorbell rings at two in the afternoon.
I'm on the couch with my head in Taz's lap, half-asleep while he reads cattle reports on his tablet.
He said no phones, but tablets apparently don't count, and I'm too tired to argue about it.
First-trimester exhaustion, I guess. Or maybe just the exhaustion of having feelings again after months of numbness.
"I'll get it," Taz says, shifting me gently onto a pillow.
I close my eyes and listen to his footsteps, the click of the door, the murmur of voices. Then silence, too long of it. I open my eyes.
Taz is standing in the doorway with a woman behind him, and my stomach drops.
Kendall Brooks.
She's exactly as beautiful as when I first met her: cheekbones like architecture, perfectly tousled blonde hair, legs that go on forever in a fitted dress that probably costs more than my car.
She looks like someone who's never doubted her place in the world, never had to fight for space, never stood in a room wondering if she belonged there.
She also looks exhausted, with red-rimmed eyes and pale skin, and one hand spread over the small swell of her belly under that expensive dress.
"Molly," Taz says, and his voice is strange. Careful. "You remember Kendall."
"Of course." I sit up, pulling my robe tighter, acutely aware of my unwashed hair and my bare face and the test I left sitting on the kitchen counter. "Hi, Kendall."
"Hi." Her smile is brittle, practiced. "I'm so sorry to just show up like this. I should have called."
"What's going on?" I ask, because Taz looks like a man who's just watched a stranger's emergency walk into the one day he promised was ours, and Kendall looks like she's about to cry, and neither of them is saying the obvious thing.
Kendall takes a breath. "Richard and I are divorced.
It was final last week. It's been—it's been a process.
I've been staying with friends, but everyone's tired of me, honestly, and I just—" She stops, presses her lips together.
"I'm pregnant. I found out after he left.
And I don't have anywhere to go right now, not while I figure out what I'm doing, and Taz was always—we were always—"
She looks at him, and he looks at the floor, and I can't read either of them.
"You two dated," I say. "In college."
"A lifetime ago," Kendall says quickly. "It was nothing serious. But we stayed friends. Taz has always been—" She stops again, seems to reconsider her words. "He's always been kind to me."
I look at my husband. He's staring at the floor, jaw tight, and I can see him wrestling with the problem of her.
He doesn't want her here. I know him well enough to know that.
But he's also the man who won't call an exterminator because he can't stand to kill anything, who builds honey houses and makes sandwiches and cries on kitchen floors.
He's not going to turn away a pregnant woman with nowhere to go.
Neither am I.
"Of course you can stay," I hear myself say. "We have a guest room."
Kendall's eyes fill with tears. "Really?"
"It's fine." I stand up, belting my robe tighter. "Taz, can you get her bags?"
He nods, still not looking at me, and disappears down the hall. Kendall stands in the doorway with her rolling suitcase and her perfect hair and her tragic-princess exhaustion, and I try to remember that she's a person in crisis, not a threat.
It's just a few weeks, I tell myself. Just until she figures things out. We can handle a few weeks.
Kendall wheels her bag past me toward the guest room, and her eyes land on the kitchen counter. On the pregnancy test I left sitting there like an idiot, pink lines visible from across the room.
Her smile freezes.
It's only for a second. A blink-and-you-miss-it moment where her pretty eyes go flat and cold, and then the warmth is back, the gratitude, the perfectly appropriate expression of surprise.
"Oh my goodness," she says. "You're pregnant too?"
"Just found out this morning," I say, and wish I hadn't.
"That's—" She presses a hand to her chest. "That's wonderful. Congratulations. Both of you."
Taz comes back with her bags. Kendall lets him lead her to the guest room. And I stand alone in the living room with that frozen smile replaying in my mind, and I tell myself I imagined it.
And when I pick up the test from the counter, I notice my hands are shaking.