Open the bathroom door.
Walk quietly down the hall.
Beckett is still asleep, his face unguarded, his arm still reaching across the space where I was.
I stand in the doorway and look at him and think about waking him up right now and telling him everything.
I think about the porch instead.
Coffee first, then forever.
The coffee is ready by five.
I make it the way I always make it, two cups, the same way Beckett started making two cups somewhere in the early weeks without discussing it and the habit transferred between us so naturally that neither of us could say exactly when it happened.
I take both cups to the front porch.
The ranch is still dark. The hill line invisible against the pre-dawn sky, the barn a quiet shape, the string lights from last night still glowing faintly in the oak tree at the creek bend because nobody turned them off. Nobody is going to turn them off for a while either. They're too good to lose yet.
I sit in my chair.
Hold both cups.
Look at the ranch in the dark.
The test is in my shirt pocket.
I've been carrying it long enough for the reality to settle in a little, and it still feels like the most significant thing I've ever put in a pocket. Which is saying something given that I once carried a colic emergency protocol and a fence repair invoice in the same pocket on the worst Tuesday of the year.
The front door opens at five-twenty.
Beckett comes through it with his hat already on and his boots on and the expression of a man who reached across the bed, found nothing, and has been moving toward the porch ever since. He stops when he sees me. Looks at the two cups in my hands.
Looks at my face.
He knows my faces.
I can tell because his expression shifts immediately into the careful, attentive version of himself that means he has registered something and is giving it space.
He sits in his chair.
I hand him a coffee.
He takes it without looking away from me.
We sit for a moment in the pre-dawn quiet. The ranch breathing around us, the string lights still on, the first birds starting somewhere in the oak tree line. Normal Sunday morning at Silver Mesa.
Absolutely nothing normal about this Sunday morning.
"You've been up a while," he says quietly.
"Since four."
"You okay?"
I look at my coffee. Look at the ranch. Look at him in the early dark with his hat and his steady eyes and the ring he put on my finger twelve hours ago at an oak tree in the south pasture.
I reach into my shirt pocket.
