We talked a little, nothing important, just enough to keep the night from closing in. He told me about a gas station in Billings where he’d once seen a raccoon steal an entire breakfast sandwich out of a trucker’s hand. I told him about the time Burke accidentally set the hayloft on fire and tried to put it out with whiskey.
We laughed a lot. We didn’t touch, but the space between us felt charged, like the house was holding its breath.
Around ten, he stood and stretched. “I should get some sleep.”
“Me too,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I’d manage.
He started for the hallway, then stopped and turned. “Thanks. For everything.”
“Anytime,” I said.
He nodded, then slipped down the hall, feet quiet on the old wood.
I sat at the table for a while, just watching the embers die in the stove and listening to the baby’s even breaths on the monitor. My hand went to the ring, twisted it once, and I let myself think about the fact that it was real. All of it.
The house at night was a different animal than in daylight—quieter, more cunning, every board and rafter settling into its own private treaty with gravity.
If you listened, you could hear the war: the expansion and contraction of old wood, the water heater’s faint complaints, the wind taking a run at the gutters every half hour or so.
I made one last round before bed, the kind of patrol that only made sense if you’d spent too many years with no safe place to sleep. Checked all the windows, made sure the porch was clear, ran a thumb over the baby monitor until the static confirmed it was alive and kicking.
The nursery was at the far end of the upstairs, a room that caught no moon, but plenty of cold. I stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and listened. Emilio was asleep in the crib, a loose heap of limbs and blanket, mouth open, every inch of him radiating the kind of peace that only comes when you don’t know how to expect trouble.
The room smelled like baby powder and cedar and the faint, ever-present undertone of the ancient floors. I breathed it in, let the quiet press against the inside of my head.
For a long minute, I just stood there and watched the rise and fall of his chest, the slow cycle of inhale, exhale, the hint of drool at the corner of his mouth.
Down the hall, I heard the soft, irregular movements of a man trying to make himself small in an unfamiliar room. Liam was unpacking, or maybe just pacing, the floorboards squeaking their complaints even under his careful weight.
I thought about the way he’d looked at me at the kitchen table, the way the laughter had made his whole face break open, how it was gone in a second but still lingered, an afterimage on the back of my eyelids.
I could have gone to him. Could have made some excuse, asked about a feeding schedule or the temperature or whether the sheets in the guest room were too rough. But I didn’t. I stayed where I was, hand on the doorframe, and let the space between us be what it was—a promise instead of a challenge, a maybe instead of a demand.
I’d spent a lot of my life moving too fast, looking for the shortcut, trying to fix things before they had a chance to break. But this? This was different. This I wanted to get right.
Emilio shifted in the crib, made a small, satisfied sigh, and went boneless again. The sight of it nearly undid me.
I let my hand drop to my side, stepped back, and pulled the door mostly closed behind me.
In my own room, I stripped down to the t-shirt and sweats I’d scavenged from a box of old gear. The sheets were cold, but I liked it that way—the shock of it, the reminder that I was still alive and not just running on leftover adrenaline.
I lay there in the dark, hand resting on my chest, listening to the sounds of the house and the baby and the man down the hall.
I thought about what I wanted. Not just a legal arrangement, not just a solution to someone else’s problem. I wanted the whole thing—the mess and the work and the impossible luck of waking up in a house where laughter was louder than fear.
I let myself think about it, really think, until the world started to fade at the edges. The last thing I heard before sleep was the baby’s slow, even breathing, and the faint, familiar sound of a man settling in for the night, in a room that was no longer just a guest room.
It was enough to dream on.
Chapter Twelve
~ Liam ~
The bed in the guest room was barely wide enough to lie on my back with my arms folded, which was fine, because I’d spent the last hour not moving.
I kept expecting my body to rebel and roll over, but it was like I’d become part of the furniture: a bundle of nerves and cold feet pressed into cedar-scented sheets, a single fixed point in the dark.
The ceiling was nothing to look at. Plain, unfinished, split by the seam where the house had been expanded, or maybe just settled unevenly over a century of snowpack and sun. But I stared at it anyway, counted out the old nail heads, tracked the silvered lines of glue where the insulation had peeled away in some ancient repair.
