"I'm not doing anything."
"You're thinking loudly."
"That's not a thing."
"It is with you." I turned her toward me, hands at her waist, careful around the bump. She put her palms flat on my chest and looked up at me and I looked back at her and thought about seven months ago—a waiting room, a sunflower print, a spreadsheet that didn't add up—and about everything that had happened between that morning and this one.
"What," she said.
"Nothing." I pressed my mouth to her temple. "Dance with me."
"You don't dance."
"I do now."
She laughed and leaned in and we moved slowly, not really dancing, just standing close while the music played, her cheek against my chest. My hand found her stomach the way it alwaysdid. Automatic. Like checking something I needed to know was still there.
Something moved under my palm.
I went still.
Millie looked up. Her eyes were bright. "She's been doing that all day," she said. "I didn't want to say anything until you felt it."
I kept my hand there and waited.
There—again. Small and definite, pressing back. Hello.
I looked at my wife.
My wife looked at me.
The string lights moved in the October breeze. Behind us Haven laughed at something, and my dad was still talking about limestone, and Elena Calloway was feeding my mother something off a spoon, and Daniela was letting my cousin hold her closer than was strictly necessary.
The ranch spread out in the dark past the tree line. The creek ran below, somewhere. Three generations of limestone and cedar and Holt stubbornness holding the ground the way it always had, the way it always would.
My daughter pressed her hand against mine through six inches of Millie.
"Hey," I said quietly. To both of them. "I've got you.”
TWENTY-ONE
Gage
The door had barely closed behind us.
I'd been patient all day. Through the ceremony and the reception and my dad's limestone monologue and watching Sawyer dance with Daniela and feeling my daughter move under my palm for the first time. Patient through all of it, my hand at Millie's back, her smell in my nose every time she leaned close, that dress.
That dress.
"Gage—"
"Turn around," I said.
She turned. Presented me with a column of tiny pearl buttons running from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, and I looked at them and then at her bare shoulders and thought about how long it was going to take me to get through every single one.
Good.
I wanted it to take a long time.
