Eight weeks.
The number sat in my chest the whole drive down to San Antonio, solid and specific in a way that the positive test hadn't quite been, the way the nausea every morning hadn't quite been. A number meant a date. A date meant a person. A person meant?—
It meant the land was ours, but more than that…
…it meant we were making something together. That Millie and I had created a new life.
She was having my baby, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.
Millie had her hands folded in her lap and was watching the Hill Country roll by outside the window. She'd been quiet since we left, not the wound-up quiet of four weeks ago but something softer. Turned inward in a way that didn't worry me anymore.
I drove. Let her have it.
At her doctor's office, I held the door and she walked through. I thought about the last waiting room we'd sat in together—the lavender, the sunflower print, the AC set to the temperature of sensible expectations—and how far we were from that morning.
We sat, masks on, she looked around at the other women—some visibly pregnant, a few with partners, one reading something on her phone with the focused expression of a person doing research. Millie had made that face for weeks before her first appointment. I'd watched her do it at the kitchen table at six in the morning, cross-referencing things I couldn't follow, building a new spreadsheet.
Some things didn't change.
She looked at me sideways over her mask. "Last time we were in a waiting room together you were a stranger."
"Last time you propositioned me inside of forty minutes."
"I did notpropositionyou."
"You laid out a formal arrangement."
"That's called aproposal."
"In some circles."
Her mouth curved—I could see it in her eyes above the mask. "You could have said no."
"I did say no. Twice. You did more math."
"And it worked."
"It worked," I agreed.
She shifted closer, her shoulder settling against my arm. "You sat down next to me first."
"There was an open seat."
"There were four open seats."
I looked at the wall across from us. "The other ones looked uncomfortable."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh. I felt it against my arm. "That's the worst lie you've ever told me."
"I've told you very few lies."
"The chair, Gage."
"The chair had good sightlines."
She tipped her head up to look at me. I looked back down at her. Two months ago she'd been a woman in a marigoldmask doing math on a spreadsheet she couldn't make work, and I'd been a man with a problem I couldn't solve, and we'd sat in adjacent chairs and talked about inheritance law and saint's candles and somewhere in the middle of it something had shifted that I hadn't had a name for until much later.
I took her hand.
