She nodded, something careful moving across her face, braced for the but.
"Tell me about the last few years," I said instead.
She looked up. "What?"
"Before the clinic. Before all this."
She was quiet for a moment, deciding whether this was a redirect or something real. Then she leaned back against the counter beside me, arms crossed, and let out a slow breath.
"You know about the job," she said.
"Tell me anyway."
"Four years at the Riverwalk property. Event manager. I was—" A small pause. "I was really good at it. I could run twelve vendors and a live band and a mother of the bride simultaneously and never drop a single thing." Something fond and tired moved through her expression. "And then the hotel shut down and I lost my job and everything just…stopped."
"And then?"
"And then it was just me. In my apartment. Watching the savings go." She picked at a thread on her sleeve. "I have good people. My parents, Daniela. I wasn't alone." Another pause. "But I was lonely in this specific way. Like I'd built this whole life and it just—stopped. And everything I'd been working toward kept getting pushed further out and further out and I ran out of patience for waiting for the version where everything was in order first." She looked at me sideways. "Hence the spreadsheet."
"Hence the spreadsheet," I said.
She was quiet for a moment.
"And now?" I said.
She looked around the kitchen. At the cottage, the afternoon light, the ridiculous bench sitting on the counter between us.
"Now I wake up and your mother has made biscuits," she said. "And your dad is talking about limestone and Haven is pretending not to watch Wyatt and Neto is just—there, being Neto, and the goats are losing their minds about something, and I have nowhere to be and I'm not scared." She stopped. Her voice had gone quieter. "I haven't felt at home anywhere in three years. And I've been here ten days."
I looked at her.
She looked back, something careful and a little braced in it.
"That scares me," she said. "How fast it is."
"I know," I said.
"You could decide—" She stopped. "Things end."
"They do," I said.
"That's not?—"
"I'm not trying to reassure you," I said. "I'm agreeing with you that things end." I turned to face her fully. "I'm also telling you that I haven't thought about this as an arrangement in about a week. Don't know exactly when that stopped but it did." I held her gaze. "What I want after is you at that table. In this house. Having my baby and staying and maybe…well, maybe havin’ another one if that's what you want, and my dad telling you things about limestone for the next thirty years."
She stared at me.
"Gage."
"I know it's fast."
"It's extremely fast."
"I know."
"We've known each other for?—"
"Ten days," I said. "I know exactly how long it's been."
