“It looks great.” Grace added a dab of paint to a spot they’d missed and stood back, hands on her hips again. “Our beach-themed room is coming together.”
“Should we work on the crib?” Alex asked. Grace glanced at her phone.
“It’s getting late—don’t you need to get back to work?”
Alex met her eyes. “What could be more important than this?”
A heartbeat passed, then Grace nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s start assembling. I’ll just grab some mints first.”
“Oh, I forgot.” Alex reached into his pocket and pulled out a tin. “I brought you these.”
“You didn’t have to.” Grace popped one into her mouth. “But thank you.”
“Anytime. I meant what I said about being around. About being there for you.”
“And I appreciate that.” Grace met his eyes again. Then her gaze dropped a few inches to the spot of yellow paint on his collared shirt. “Um…”
“What?”
“You’ve got a little something.” She pointed to the paint. Alex looked down and shook his head.
“Oops. Hey, you’ve got something, too.”
“Where?” As Grace twisted to look at her clothes, Alex closed the space between them and put a tiny dab of yellow paint on Grace’s nose. They both laughed, and Grace wiped it off with her hand.
“Enough of that,” she said mock sternly. “We have a crib to assemble. Or cribs?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s two cribs joined together.”
“Well, I hope they’re baby bunk beds, or they’ll never fit in here.”
“Yeah, I’m a hundred percent sure that baby bunk beds don’t exist,” Alex said in the soothing tone of someone explaining fractions to a panicky third-grader. “We’ll find space.”
“So you say,” Grace mumbled, but she followed him into the living room. She cleaned up the paint supplies while Alex opened the boxes and read the instructions. Then she joined him on the floor, moving a little laboriously with her increasingly large stomach. Alex was staring at two almost identical nails with a look of great concentration.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I think these are different,” Alex said. “One is nail A-seventeen, and the other is nail B-twenty-two. Here, look at the diagram.”
Grace frowned at the paper he was holding up, then nodded. “That’s nail A-seventeen. See? It’s a tiny bit longer.”
“Excellent.” Alex grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. What’s next?”
They dove into crib construction together, passing each other nails and screws, holding up the boards as the other joined them together, and generally working as a team. It reminded Grace of the times they’d worked together back at MatchupNow, when everything had seemed to flow.
Only this time, instead of a flawless section of code, the crib they created was lopsided and wobbly.
“Is the bed part supposed to be slanted like that?” Grace asked suspiciously. Alex placed a spare nail in the crib bed, and it rolled right out and onto the floor.
“I really don’t think so.”
“And the legs… are they supposed to be different lengths?”
“Perhaps not.”
“And most importantly, why is this section sticking out like a spike?”
“A great question.”
