SIXTEEN
Gage
She'd been quiet since breakfast.
Not her kind of quiet—not the soft, loose quiet she settled into after a long night, when she'd curl into my side and talk about nothing until she fell back asleep. This was different. Wound up and turned inward, somewhere I couldn't follow.
I'd caught her at the kitchen window twice, coffee going cold in her hands. Watched her start three separate sentences and let them dissolve. She'd swept the same section of counter twice without noticing.
I noticed. That was the thing about Millie—she was easy to watch. Not just because she was beautiful, though she was, unreasonably so, standing there in my kitchen in cutoffs and one of my old flannels with her hair loose. But because she moved through a room like she was always slightly in conversation with it, touching things, rearranging, making herself at home in a way that had stopped surprising me and started feeling like something I'd been waiting for without knowing it.
Her parents were coming. Elena and Robert Calloway, driving up from San Antonio, due in twenty minutes. Millie had cleaned things that weren't dirty and rearranged the throw pillows three times and made a pan of something that smelledincredible and then stood here at the window going somewhere else entirely.
Daniela was coming too. That part she'd mentioned like a footnote, like it wasn't going to send her best friend straight into the orbit of my cousin Sawyer, who I was choosing not to think about.
I checked my phone. Twenty minutes.
Millie was at the sink pretending to rinse a mug she'd already rinsed.
"Come here," I said.
She turned. Not quick enough for it to be nothing.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't." I patted my knee. "Come here."
She hesitated—that little flicker of resistance she did when she knew I was going to get the truth out of her anyway. Then she came and sat in my lap, and I wrapped an arm around her waist and felt some of the tension go out of her just from that. She fit there. She always fit there, like she'd been sized for it.
I took her hand and held it.
"Talk."
"My parents are going to be here in?—"
"Twenty minutes. I know." I kept my voice even. "Tell me what's wrong."
She pulled in a slow breath. Let it out. "I'm late."
I went still.
"I don't know yet," she said quickly. "I haven't taken anything. It's three days now, and I've been trying not to make it into something, but?—"
"How long have you known?"
Her eyes cut to the window. "This morning I was sure. Earlier this week I just—I didn't want to say anything until?—"
I stood, taking her with me, and set her on the edge of the kitchen table.
"Gage—"
"I know." I stepped between her knees. Took her face in both hands, tilted it up. Her eyes were too bright. I ran my thumb along her jaw. "Twenty minutes."
"That's not enough time to?—"
"It's enough." I kissed her once, firm. "Stay there."
"My parents are going to walk in and find me on the kitchen table?—"
