Grace sat there another minute or two until Reno’s truck pulled up out front.
She locked the bakery door, walked across the sidewalk, and got in.
“Did she tell you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Will she tell Cooper.”
“Tomorrow. I’m going with her.”
“Good.”
He drove for a bit in silence, then said, “Thank you for trusting me to take care of your case.”
“I know you well enough to be certain you’re the best at what you do,” she replied matter-of-factly. “You don’t settle for anything less from yourself. It’s why you’ve been so hard on yourself these past three years.”
He was thoughtfully silent the rest of the way to Tessa’s farm.
When she stepped down from the truck in Tessa’s driveway, his hand was there at her elbow even though she didn’t need to be steadied. He steadied her anyway, and she let him, and she liked it.
They walked across the gravel toward the porch. Through the kitchen window, Grace could see Lily standing on a kitchen chair stirring something at the counter while Tessa watched her.
“Looks like Lily’s making supper,” Reno observed.
“God help us.”
He laughed and they went inside.
Tessa insisted they stay for the pizza Lily had helped her make for supper. While the pizzas baked in the oven, Makayla tried to show Lily how to play her violin, and the house was filled with screeching noises fit to wake the dead. Reno suggested it sounded like two cats fighting, and Dillon grinned and suggested it sounded like that cats were doing something else together.
Nobody brought up the lawsuit over supper, and it was a laughter-filled affair with Dillon and Reno one-upping each other with stories about the other brother’s misspent youth.
Reno carried Lily out to the truck piggyback on his shoulders, giggling. He put her in her car seat and buckled her in, and as the three of them drove toward the cottage, Lily announced, “I want a brother.”
“Why’s that?” Grace asked, startled.
“So I when I grow up, I can tell funny stories about dumb things he did.”
“What if he’s really smart and never does dumb things?” Reno asked.
Lily said with disdainfully, “He’s a boy. He’ll do dumb things.”
That made Reno laugh, and Grace smiled beside him, distracted. She’d loved being pregnant and having a baby, in spite of being overwhelmed by grief the whole time. It would be nice to experience it when happy.
An image of a baby boy with Reno’s dark, dark brown hair and big, dark eyes popped into her head, shocking her into silence.
After Lily was asleep with a stuffed seal under each arm, Grace went out to the back porch, where Reno was typing on his laptop. Undoubtedly, he was writing up some dastardly new filing to cause Tara Marchand and her lawyer headaches.
“Reno, can I ask you a question?”
He looked up. “Of course. Anything.”
“What does Madison like? We’re meeting her tomorrow and I want her to feel comfortable with me.”
“She’s going to love you. And to answer your question, she likes horses, math, and sarcastic boys. Last I heard, she’s fretting about what she wants to study in college and which university she should go to.”
“Isn’t that decision still a few years away for her?”
