“I need you to come to the bathroom.”
Both eyes opened at that. She sat up slowly, pushing her hair back, reading my face the way she’d gotten good at over the past two months. She wasn’t going to find anything there. I’d made sure of that.
She followed me down the hall, her feet quiet on the floorboards, and stopped in the bathroom doorway when she saw what was on the counter.
The silence stretched.
“Griffin—”
“When did you last have your period?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. A frown appeared along with the slow, dawning realization of a woman who had been too busy holding the world together to notice the world shifted under her feet.
“I’ve been tired because of school,” she said. But her voice had lost its conviction halfway through the sentence.
“You left your coffee this morning.”
“I wasn’t thirsty.”
I picked up the test and held it out. “Take it, Keely.”
She took it from my hand without looking at me. I stepped out and pulled the door closed and stood in the hallway with myback against the wall and my arms crossed and every carefully constructed argument I’d ever made about being too old and too damaged and too far gone roaring back to life in my chest all at once.
A baby.
I was thirty-five years old with scars on my body and ghosts in my head and hands that had done things I’d never be able to undo. I’d spent years telling myself I had no business wanting a life. Months reminding myself I had no business wanting her. And now—
The door opened.
She was standing there with the test in her hand, and her eyes were bright and wet. She wasn’t looking at me like the confident sassy waitress I’d fallen in love with. She was scared.
I looked at the test. Two lines.
The roaring in my chest instantly went silent.
I took her face in my hands, tilting it up to mine. She was holding herself very still, waiting. Still doing that thing she did where she braced for the weight before it landed, ready to carry it alone if she had to.
She wasn’t alone anymore. She had me.
“Griffin,” she whispered. “Say something.”
“You’re having my baby.” The words came out low and certain and so far from afraid that I almost didn’t recognize my own voice.
Her breath caught. “That’s—yes. That’s what the test says.”
“Good.” I pressed my forehead against hers, my hands sliding from her jaw to her neck, feeling the pulse jumping there. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“You’re not—” She pulled back enough to look at me. “You’re not scared?”
She was carrying my child. The thought landed with a finality that had nothing to do with accident or timing andeverything to do with inevitability—like this was always where the road had been going, back when I was driving home from a wedding telling myself I had no business wanting anything at all. She was mine. She’d been mine since the moment I’d first seen her, smiling and pouring coffee for strangers.
But this couldn’t be walked back. Couldn’t be talked away. Couldn’t be taken from me. That didn’t frighten me. It settled me—down into my bones, into the places the noise used to live—in a way nothing else ever had.
I thought about the desert. About fifteen months of lying in the dark, listening to the silence that never quiet was. About a twenty-three-year-old waitress who’d walked into all of that damage with her chin up and her eyes open and her sharp tongue ready.
“Terrified,” I said honestly. “Doesn’t change anything.”
She gave a half sob, half laugh and then she was in my arms, her face pressed against my chest and I held her. Tight and close.
