Take out the test.
Hold it out across the space between our chairs.
He looks at it.
Takes it from my hand slowly.
Looks at the two lines in the pre-dawn light, turning it slightly, making sure he's reading it correctly. He is reading it correctly. There is nothing ambiguous about two lines.
The porch is very quiet.
He looks up at me.
His expression does something I have never seen it do before in all the time I've spent learning every expression he has.
It moves through several things very fast, surprise, calculation, something that is trying to be composed, landing on something so open and unguarded and enormous that the composure never really arrives.
His eyes are bright.
Beckett Wilder, who walked into board rooms and hostile takeovers and one shareholder meeting where someone threw a water bottle. Who held a fence line in a flash flood and cantered a horse in front of the whole town.
"Laney?" His voice is not entirely steady.
"Yeah," I say softly.
He looks at the test.
Looks at the ring on my finger.
Looks at the ranch in the early dark around us.
"We're having a baby," he says. Not a question. Just the true thing.
Said plain and steady, the way he says all true things.
"We're having a baby," I confirm.
He sets the coffee down on the porch rail. Reaches across the space between our chairs. Takes both my hands in his and holds them with the steady certain grip of a man who has decided where he is and is not going anywhere. He leans in and kisses me on the lips. He says I love you so much.
We sit like that in the pre-dawn dark while Silver Mesa wakes up around us and the string lights glow and the hill line starts its slow transition from black to gray to the first pale gold of morning.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
We don't need to.
Maisie finds out at breakfast.
Not because we planned to tell her at breakfast specifically. Because Maisie comes downstairs at seven-thirty with her hair in lopsided braids and her turquoise boots already on and finds us at the kitchen table now.
We are holding hands across it with the expression of two people sitting inside something enormous. She stops in the doorway and reads the room in approximately four seconds.
She looks at our hands. Looks at our faces.
Looks at the test sitting on the table between the coffee cups because neither of us moved it.
She looks at the test for a long moment. Looks at me.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asks.
