Chapter Forty-Seven—Riley
Istand in the middle of the living room and take it in.
Half-assembled crib leaning against the wall like it gave up halfway through.
Liam on his knees in the corner, arguing with a screwdriver like it personally offended him.
The nursery walls are yellow in a way that probably violates several agreements between human beings and color theory.
Boxes everywhere. Sunlight through the glass doors onto actual grass.
I don’t trust it yet.
Liam looks up and spots me. “Ri! Come settle this. Andrew says the yellow is radioactive. I say it’s cheerful.”
“It’s radioactive,” Andrew says from behind a stack of boxes. He doesn’t look up.
“Babies love cheerful,” Liam insists.
“Babies can’t see colors yet,” Ethan says from the kitchen. He has his laptop open. He is absolutely running a furniture placement analysis. He will never admit this.
“They can feel the energy,” Liam says.
“That’s not—” Ethan stops. Takes a breath. “That’s not how energy works.”
“It’s how vibes work. Which is a subset of energy. Andrew, back me up.”
Andrew appears in the doorway holding a paint chip. He looks at the chip. Looks at the wall. “It’s a lot of yellow.”
“It’s joyful.”
“It’s aggressive.”
“Same thing.”
I sit down on a box in the hallway and just watch them. Liam has the screwdriver again. He’s attempting something with the crib that I’m sixty percent sure is wrong. Andrew watches him for exactly four seconds, then steps in and adjusts one piece, and the whole section clicks into place.
Liam stares at it. “Okay. But it was basically there.”
“It wasn’t,” Andrew says, already walking away.
“It was conceptually there.”
“That’s still not there.”
“Andrew—”
“Liam.”
I laugh, and I don’t check it for cracks.
Ethan appears in the kitchen doorway. “If anyone had followed the unpacking system I sent, the boxes would be done by now.”
“We’ve been doing fine,” Liam says.
“You’ve been arguing with hardware for forty minutes.”
“That’s part of the process.”
“That’s the opposite of the process.”
“Maybe your process is wrong.”
Ethan opens his mouth. Looks at me. I hold up both hands. “I’m not getting in the middle of this.”
“Coward,” Liam says cheerfully.
I slip away after a while and stand in the doorway of the nursery. It’s not finished—the paint is dry but one wall still has tape on the trim. An unopened box in the corner says MISC with a question mark underneath that I think means none of us know what’s in it.
My hand goes to my stomach. The baby moves, that flutter I’m getting used to now. More distinct every day.
I moved to Portland because I needed somewhere that felt temporary. I told myself that was practical. I picked an apartment where everything could be boxed up in an afternoon. I thought that was a feature. This can’t be boxed up in an afternoon.
I’m still figuring out what to do with that.
Footsteps behind me. Liam drops onto the floor in the doorway and leans against the frame, looking up at me from the ground—which is absolutely the most chaotic way to exist in any space, and also completely him.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“You doing the thing where you say yeah but mean something more complicated?”
I look down at him. “A little.”
He stretches his legs out. “Tell me the complicated thing.”
I lean against the opposite side of the frame. “I keep waiting to feel like I earned it.”
He’s quiet. That’s unusual enough that I pay attention.
“Does it feel real?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Does it feel good?”
I look at the half-painted room. The obscenely yellow wall. The crib that took Andrew three seconds to fix. “Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
“The earning thing catches up,” he says. “It always does.”
Andrew appears at the end of the hall a few minutes later. He looks at Liam on the floor and me in the doorway and doesn’t change expression—he just comes and leans against the wall beside me.
Ethan comes too, eventually. He closes the laptop first. I notice that.
The four of us in the doorway of the half-finished nursery.
Liam starts humming something under his breath that I’m pretty sure is from a kids’ TV show.
Andrew tells him to stop. He doesn’t stop.
Ethan puts his hand over mine where it’s resting on my stomach and just keeps it there, not saying anything at all.
We stay like that until one of the boxes Liam stacked in the living room falls over.
“That’s on you,” Andrew says.
“That’s on gravity,” Liam says.
Ethan goes to fix it.
I don’t move from the doorway.