“Your dad is going to be so mad he missed this,” she laughed, the sound a little wet as she sniffled. “He loves this kind of chaos.”
“Tell him to start waking up at a reasonable hour and maybe he won’t miss so much,” Gage grunted.
Millie still had my arm. I looked at her across the table—both of us pregnant, Bea between us trying to eat the puppy's ear, the whole loud warm kitchen chaos all around us.
“I’m so glad to have you as a sister,” she said, squeezing my hand.
“Me too,” I said.
Then I looked at Wyatt.
He was watching his mother at the stove, something open on his face that I didn't usually get to see—something young, almost. Like a man remembering he was allowed to be happy.
I did that. Me. Haven, the girl who’d longed for him for years and known, on some instinctive level, that we were meant to be.
It was all finally happening.
And I was truly,thoroughlyhappy.
Epilogue
WYATT
Penny had discovered that if she sat directly on Haven's feet, Haven would stop moving.
It was a solid strategy. Haven was cross-legged on the living room floor with Ethan in her lap and Penny draped across her ankles like a very small, self-satisfied anchor. The little red heeler wasn't going anywhere, and all three of them seemed fine with this arrangement.
Ethan was three months old and already had opinions. Right now his opinion was that the ceiling fan was the most interesting thing that had ever existed, and he was staring at it like he’d found god up there. Haven was narrating the fan to him in a low voice, pointing at it, and he was tracking her finger with his whole face.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them.
I'd been watching them like this for three months. Couldn't stop. Haven with our son had broken something open in me that I didn't have language for—some last locked room I hadn't known was still shut. She was so easy with him. So confident. The same way she was certain about everything, had always been certain, from the first night she'd asked me for a kiss behind the Spur almost exactly a year ago.
Penny looked up and saw me watching and her tail thumped twice against the floor.
Haven looked up too.
"Hey, stranger,” she said.
"Hey.”
Ethan made a sound at the ceiling fan.
"He's having a whole conversation," Haven said. "Very advanced."
"He's three months old."
"He's your son," she said. "He came out advanced. I mean…we all know you’re the smartest Holt, right?”
“And he’s got a smart mama,” I smiled. “Smarter than his dad, anyway.”
I crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside her, my back against the couch, and she leaned into me automatically the way she always did now. Ethan turned his head and looked at me with the serious blue eyes he'd had since birth—Holt eyes, my mother had said, crying, when she first held him.
I reached into my shirt pocket.
The ring had been there for months. My mother had pressed it into my hand at the hospital, two hours after Ethan was born, without a word. I'd known what she meant. I'd been carrying it ever since, waiting for the right moment, which kept not arriving, which I was starting to understand was just fear with better clothes on.
Haven was talking to our son, something low and sweet about the fan, and it hit me all at once.
