When the cereal was gone, and the baby had been changed again, I looked at Liam. “You good?” I asked.
He nodded, not looking up. “Yeah. I’m good.”
We went through the rest of the day as if it were a drill: chores, feed, shovel snow, make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen in the night. Emilio rotated between us and the bouncy seat, sometimes content, sometimes incandescent with need. Every hour or so, we swapped out—one of us inside with the baby, the other outside pretending that something couldn’t wait another minute.
Around noon, the wind picked up, and a new snow started, just enough to dust the windows and make the house go a little darker. I stoked the fire in the fireplace, added a log, and watched the flames curl orange and blue through the warped glass.
Liam sat on the couch, baby asleep on his chest, arms cradled around him in a protective arch. He didn’t notice me watching, or maybe he did and didn’t mind. I liked the look of it, the way their two heads mirrored each other, one fair and one dark, both with the same stubborn set to the jaw.
Just before sunset, Rawley showed up. He then let himself in, bringing with him a plume of cold air and a scatter of snow that settled in the entry like a dare.
He paused in the mudroom, boots planted, and looked at me for a long second. The look was full of things he wouldn’t say in front of Liam—a post-mortem on the courthouse, a calculation of risk, maybe even a rare note of approval.
He nodded at me, then at the baby, then at Liam, who had stood up when the door opened.
Rawley said, “All good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “All good.”
He seemed to accept that. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Supposed to get ugly tonight. Watch the pipes.”
I grinned. “Already on it.”
He nodded again, lingered just long enough to make it weird, then left. For a few seconds, the house was silent except for the faint, receding clunk of Rawley’s boots on the stairs.
We did dinner the way we’d done breakfast—quiet, almost ritualized, the only interruption coming when Emilio decided he’d been ignored for long enough and launched into a fresh round of complaints.
By eight, the baby was down. Not sleeping, but at least not actively plotting against us. The woodstove filled the kitchen with a soft, ticking heat, and the dark outside the windows was absolute, so black it seemed to pull at the edges of the house.
I made tea, two mugs, and brought them to the kitchen table. Liam sat at the far end, elbows on the wood, hands folded in front of him. He looked up as I set the mug down.
“Thanks,” he said.
I sat, the chair closer than I’d planned, and for a minute we just watched the steam rise.
He said, “I used to think tea was a scam.”
I snorted. “You’re not wrong.”
He smiled, the first real one all day, and I felt the pull in my chest like a muscle that had just remembered how to work.
We drank in silence for a while, the warmth settling into my bones.
Then, without warning, Liam said, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Do what?”
“This.” He gestured to the kitchen, the baby, the entire room. “The whole thing. It doesn’t have to be your problem.”
I looked at him, really looked, and saw the edge of panic under the casual delivery. It was the look of a man who’d been told too many times that nothing good lasts.
I said, “I like the problem.”
He went quiet, processing.
I let the silence stretch, then broke it with a joke: “Besides, he’s already got my jaw. I figure we’re stuck together now.”
The line landed. He laughed, a bright, sudden sound that bounced off the kitchen walls and left a smile hanging there for a few seconds after he stopped. It did things to my composure that I wasn’t proud of.
