Millie looked at the bread basket.
My mother made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "He's not wrong."
"I'm rarely wrong," my dad said.
"You're wrong constantly," my mother said. "About most things. Not about people."
He considered this. "Fair."
Something moved across Millie's face—the braced thing coming down, slowly, the way it did when she decided to let herself believe something. She pressed her lips together once.
She looked at me.
I looked back.
Under the table, she found my hand.
THIRTEEN
Millie
He moved me into the main house that night.
No more veneer of me living in the cottage like this was just an arrangement…no more pretending we were going to stop having sex when I got pregnant.
This was happening. Me and Gage—not just whatever me and Gage could make together.
Together, we packed up one of my duffels and I brought it into the house—the house where I was already sharing every meal with his family, where I’d already been told I was one of them. We also brought all the stuff I’d ordered online. For…reasons.
Reasons I was sure were about to become abundantly clear.
His room was at the end of the hall.
I'd walked past it a dozen times getting to the bathroom, the kitchen, the back porch—always the door half-open, always just a glimpse. I hadn't gone in. It hadn't felt like mine to go into.
He pushed it open now and stood aside and I walked past him into it.
It was large. That was the first thing—larger than I'd expected, the whole back corner of the house, two windows looking out over the east pasture and one facing the creek. Theevening light came through all three and lay in long bars across the floor, which was bare wood, dark and old and worn smooth in the paths that mattered. A dresser. A chair in the corner with a jacket over it. Boots lined up by the door.
That was it.
No art on the walls. No accumulated clutter. Just the space, the light, the furniture that was there because it needed to be.
And the bed.
The bed was enormous. Iron frame, dark, the headboard tall and plain. The quilt on it was the same kind as the one in the cottage—heavy, worn, the kind that had been washed a hundred times and gotten better for it. Two pillows. No decorative anything.
I stood in the middle of the room and looked at all of it.
"It's very you," I said.
"That good or bad?"
"Good." I turned around. He was leaning in the doorway, watching me take it in. "I just mean—it looks like someone who doesn't need much."
“I don’t,” he said, leaning against the wall to watch me take it all in. “Well…not until now.”
“What does that mean?”
