"Yes."
He looked at me for a long moment with those careful eyes. Wyatt had always been the one who watched before he spoke, who measured things twice before he committed to anything. It had made him a good medic and it made him a careful vet…and it occasionally made him exhausting to have a conversation with.
"She's twenty-six," he said.
"I know how old she is."
"And you met her twice."
"I know that too."
"And now she's living in the cottage."
"Wyatt." I held his gaze. "I know all of this. I've been aware of all of this. I'm not a man who does things without thinking about them and you know that."
He was quiet.
"What I need from you," I said, "is not a list of the things I already know. What I need from you is to come eat lunch and be normal about it."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—Wyatt didn't do quite smiles—but something adjacent to one. "Normal. With the woman you brought here because you need a baby and she's…an incubator."
I closed my eyes and breathed.
Looked him in the eye.
"With the woman I have an unusual arrangement with, but who I do, in fact, like."
He watched me for a second…then he started walking again. I fell back into step beside him.
"I'm not saying it's a bad idea," he said, after a moment.
"I know."
"I'm just saying?—"
"Wyatt."
"—that you have a history of making something your whole life and then wondering why you don't have anything else."
I didn't say anything to that. Partly because there was nothing to say, and partly because he wasn't wrong, and we both knew it.
We came around the side of the main house and I could hear voices through the screen door—my mother's, and another one underneath it that I recognized even though I'd only heard it a handful of times—Millie's, melodic and bright. And then a third—Sawyer, unmistakably, that loose unhurried drawl he'd picked up somewhere between Briar Hill and a film set in New Mexico.
Wyatt glanced at me.
"Sawyer's already here," I said, unnecessary.
"Apparently," he said. "Guess he's probably slackin' so he can flirt with your girl."
It shouldn't have made me rush, but it did.
I pulled open the screen door.
The kitchen had that particular midday warmth of a room that had been cooking since morning, and the table was full in a way it hadn't been in a while—my mother at the head of it, Sawyer across from her with his boots off and his hat on the back of his chair like he'd been here for hours, and Millie?—
Millie was sitting next to Sawyer with her elbows on the table and her head tilted back laughing at something, her hair half fallen out of whatever she'd put it up in, and the sight of her in that blue dress in my mother's kitchen in the noon light hit me somewhere low and certain.
Sawyer saw me first.
