“You ran a stop sign.”
Mitch stared at him. “There was a truck trying to push us off a cliff.”
“The stop sign was before the truck.”
“Are you seriously—”
“I’m just noting the facts.”
I watched them. Mitch’s hands on Caleb’s face, Caleb’s stubborn set to his jaw, the two of them standing in a road arguing about a stop sign while three zip-tied contractors bled on the asphalt behind us, and something in my chest loosened by several degrees.
They were fine. Specifically fine. The kind of fine that involved bickering and eye rolls and Mitch’s thumb tracing the edge of Caleb’s seatbelt mark like it was something precious he needed to map.
Then Mitch turned to me. Easy. Offhand. Warm. The warmth he deployed when he was covering something real with something light. “You should be careful with him,” Mitch said. His hand rested on Caleb’s shoulder. “Caleb’s carrying the next two Callahans, after all.”
The road went quiet.
I was not breathing. The words landed in the space between us and did not move. I looked at Mitch. At Caleb. At Caleb’s stomach, which looked exactly the same as it had ten seconds ago and also completely, fundamentally different.
“Two,” I said.
Caleb’s face did the thing. The quiet bright thing I’d been collecting since the first week—the warmth that lived in his eyes first and reached his mouth second—and then it broke into the full version, the grin that took over his whole face and carried no apology for how much joy it contained.
“Twins,” he said. Like it was the best word in the English language. Like someone had handed him a gift he’d been waitingfor his entire life and it had turned out to be twice as good as he’d hoped.
The world rearranged itself. The contractors, the road, the Humvee, the thin Montana sky—all of it rotated around a new center of gravity that lived somewhere behind Caleb’s sternum and was currently the size of a walnut.
Two of them. Plural. The kind of plural that meant cribs and names and a lifetime of mornings that started at five-thirty with someone who wasn’t me deciding it was time to be awake.
My knees did something they had never done in my entire career. They buckled. Not dramatically. Subtly. The kind of buckle that said the structural integrity of my lower extremities had encountered a load they were not rated for, and the engineers were taking a coffee break.
Mitch caught me. Both hands on my arms, solid and certain, his grip firm without being tight. “Easy, sweetheart.”
“Don’t.”
“You almost went down.”
“I didn’t go down,” I insisted.
“You were going down. I have witnesses.”
Cruz’s voice came from across the road. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Cruz,” I growled.
“I was looking at the contractors.”
“Thank you, Cruz.”
“You’re welcome.”
Mitch looked between us with the expression of a man who had been betrayed by his own coalition. “You two are going to be insufferable together.”
“We already are,” I said.
Cruz, without inflection: “Yes.”
Mitch’s hands were still on my arms. Warm. Steady. Not going anywhere. He leaned in, close enough that I could feel hisbreath, and said, “You’re about to be a father.” The way he said it—low, certain, meaning it all the way down—landed somewhere behind my sternum and did not move.
