"I'm just saying." She glanced sideways at me. "I'm allowed to observe. And I mean…wouldn’t it be fun to be sister-in-laws and not just besties? We could be out here together, trying to get knocked up by our?—"
I looked at her pointedly. She looked back.
Then her eyes dropped to where my hand had been, against my stomach, and something shifted in her expression.
She knew me too well. She'd known me since we were nineteen and I'd known her since before I knew myself and she had always, always been able to read me faster than I could construct a cover story.
"Camila Calloway,” she said. “Youaren’t."
"Not yet," I squeaked. "I just…uh, I’m just late. I haven't even—I haven't taken a test yet. I'm telling you that right now as a—as a preliminary."
Her eyes went wide. "Are you?—"
"Shh." I glanced at my mother, who was still negotiating her cardigan back from Dolly. "She cannot know yet. You know how she gets."
"She's going to lose her mind."
"Which is exactly why?—"
"Millie." Daniela grabbed my arm. Her voice had dropped to something that was almost not a sound. "Are youhappy?"
I looked at Gage. He was watching Sawyer demonstrate something about the horse's gait to my father, and then he must have felt me looking because he glanced over. Held my eyes for a second. One corner of his mouth moved.
"Yeah," I said. "I really am."
Daniela made a small, compressed sound that meant she was going to cry and was refusing to. She squeezed my arm instead. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm not saying anything. I'm a vault."
"You are historically not a vault."
"I am today." She straightened up. "I'm a vault and I'm also going to need you to tell me everything about that cousin."
"Daniela—"
"After. After you tell me everything. Priorities." She let go of my arm and smoothed her hair and walked back toward the group looking almost completely normal.
My mother finally got her cardigan free. She turned to me beaming, cheeks pink, holding the slightly damp sleeve up for inspection.
"I love it here," she announced.
Across the pasture, Gage looked over at me again. I pressed my hand flat to my stomach just for a second, just one second, where nobody could see.
He saw.
His expression didn't change. But his hand came up and pressed once, brief, against his own chest. Right over his heart.
I looked away before I cried in front of my mother in a goat pasture.
She would have had so many questions.
Dinner was loud in the way that only happened when two families who didn't know each other yet were trying to decide if they liked each other.
Peggy Holt had opinions about the seating arrangement and had reorganized it twice before anyone sat down. Adam had opened wine without being asked, which told me he'd been briefed and was taking it seriously. Haven was helping in the kitchen because Haven helped everywhere she went, which I'd learned in the two weeks since I'd met her—and Wyatt was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, talking to Sawyer, carefully not looking at Haven at all. Haven, for her part, was carefully not looking at him either, except for the moments she thought nobody would notice.
I noticed.
My mother had already decided she loved Peggy. It had taken approximately four minutes and a shared opinion about garlic.
"You can never use too much," my mother was saying.
