The second trimester had given it back. I wasn't taking that for granted.
Marlena came out with menus tucked under her arm, and I felt the small warmth I always did when I saw her. I'd met her maybe half a dozen times now—Sunday dinners at the main house mostly, once when she'd come by the cottage to drop off a pie for Peggy and ended up staying two hours, the two of them at the kitchen table talking in the easy shorthand of women who'd known each other since they were girls. She and Peggy had grown up together, which meant she'd been watching the Holt family from the inside for forty years, and she'd looked at me the first time we met with careful, assessing eyes—taking stock of who'd landed in Gage's kitchen—and then something in her face had settled and she'd saidyou'll doin a tone I'd taken as the compliment it was apparently meant to be.
She was sixty now, Stetson's mother, still sharp-faced and pretty, silver threading through her dark hair. The particular self-possession of a woman who'd survived something and come out the other side without making it her whole personality.
"Ladies." She set the menus down. "How are we doing today."
"Good," I said. "Better now that it's finally under ninety degrees."
She smiled at that. "Thought summer was never going to let go this year." Her eyes dropped briefly to my stomach—not rude, just acknowledging—and something softened in her face. "You're looking well. Second trimester treating you better?"
"Much better. First trimester took my coffee. I'm still not over it."
"Gage told Stetson you cried about it."
"I did not—" I stopped. "I teared up once. That's different."
Haven laughed. Marlena's smile stayed, but I noticed her eyes had moved to the window, just for a second, scanning the street outside. Then she pulled her notepad out and looked back at us.
"What can I get you."
We ordered. Marlena wrote it down and went inside, and Haven watched her go with a small frown.
"Is she okay?"
I followed her gaze through the diner window, where Marlena was clipping our ticket to the line. "She seemed fine to me."
"She kept looking at the street." Haven turned back to her sweet tea. "She gets like that sometimes when Arlo's been around."
I looked at her.
"She doesn't talk about it," Haven said. "None of them do. But you can tell." She picked at the edge of her napkin. "Stetson gets the same way. This kind of—" she paused, looking for the word. "Braced. Like he's waiting for something he already knows is coming."
I thought about that. About what it meant to have a person in your life who moved through the world like a weather system—not asking permission, not announcing himself, just arriving and leaving damage and moving on. About Peggy's face at the dinner table the night Arlo came. About Stetson sayingblood doesn't mean a damn thingin that flat, final voice.
"She'll be okay," I said. "She's got Peggy."
Haven nodded. Looked at the street again.
I did too, without meaning to.
Arlo was coming down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He wasn't looking at the diner. He was walking with his hands in his pockets, that same unhurried gait, taking up space the way he always did. He'd been in town more lately—Gage'slawyer had told us to expect it, that the closer the claim got to resolution the more Arlo would circle. Trying to find angles. Trying to apply pressure in the small ways that didn't show up in court filings.
Haven had gone still beside me.
"It's fine," I said. Quietly.
"I know," she said. Not convincingly.
Arlo crossed at the corner and I thought he was going to keep going—but he looked up. Found us on the porch. That pleasant, weathered face doing the thing it did, the smile that was really just a mask with better manners than the man underneath.
He stopped.
His eyes moved to my stomach.
I put my hand there, flat, without thinking. Just—there. Eighteen weeks of something that was already real, already ours, already named in the quiet conversations Gage and I had in the dark after he'd spent twenty minutes with his palm pressed to my belly waiting to see if he could feel anything yet.
Arlo looked at my hand on my stomach for a long moment.
