I stop folding Gigi’s tiny yellow onesie and hold my breath.
Motherhood has turned me into the kind of woman who can identify three different kinds of baby sighs from across a room. This one is not the dangerous one.
Still, Jayce goes still beside the dresser.
A soft rustle comes through the monitor. Then a tiny grunt. Then silence.
Our six-month-old daughter settles again.
I exhale. “False alarm.”
Jayce keeps his eyes on the monitor for another few seconds. “She kicked the blanket off.”
“You cannot know that from a grunt.”
“She does the same pissed-off sound when her feet get cold.”
I stare at him.
He looks back, completely serious.
This man has taken bullets, broken cartel routes, and once walked through a cabin door like vengeance in leather.
He also knows our daughter’s cold-feet noise.
My heart does something ridiculous.
“You’re very scary,” I tell him.
His mouth twitches. “Terrifying.”
“She has you wrapped around her tiny hand.”
“Yeah.”
He crosses the room and brushes his thumb over the onesie in my hands. Gigi has already spit up on it twice today, because she is beautiful, perfect, and deeply committed to laundry-based warfare.
“She smiled at me this morning,” he says.
“She smiles at the ceiling fan too.”
His eyes narrow. “Different smile.”
“Of course.”
“It was.”
I bite my lip because if I smile too hard, I might cry, and I have learned that postpartum hormones do not care if a woman has dignity.
Jayce notices. His thumb brushes my wrist, right over the faint scar from the night we met.
The one from the villa.
The one he still touches like a vow.
Three years, and he still does that to me.
Three years since he tore through a cabin door and carried me out of the worst day of my life.
