Beckett and I look at each other.
"Depends what you think it is," he says carefully.
She walks to the table. Picks up the test with both hands. Examines it with the focused scientific attention she brings to things she's trying to understand. Sets it back down.
"I'm going to be a big sister," she says.
Not a question, a verdict.
Delivered with the calm, certain authority of someone who has been the only child for eight years. Someone who had apparently already made her peace with the amendment before anyone told her it was coming.
Beckett looks at her. "How do you feel about that?"
She thinks about it honestly the way she thinks about everything important. Takes her time. Sits down at the table with us and puts her chin in her hands and looks at the test and then at the window and then at the ranch outside it.
"I feel good about it," she says finally. "I've been practicing."
I look at her. "Practicing what."
"Being a big sister." She says it like this is obvious. "I've been bossing Remy around for four months already. That's basically the same skill set."
Beckett makes a sound that is not a laugh and absolutely is a laugh.
I press my lips together.
"Remy is going to be so excited," she says, moving on with the organizational energy of someone who has already begun planning. "Can I tell him? I want to tell him. He's going to make it weird but in a good way." She looks at Beckett. "Silas will just nod but it'll be a really meaningful nod." She looks at me. "June already knows, doesn't she."
I look at the table.
"June already knows," Maisie confirms to herself. "That's fine. June can keep a secret." She picks up a piece of toast from the plate in the center of the table. "Pearl is going to say something like well it's about time."
"Pearl says that about everything," Beckett says.
"Because it's always true," Maisie says simply.
She eats her toast with the settled contentment of someone whose morning has delivered exactly what it needed to deliver. Rowdy wanders in from somewhere and drops himself on her feet under the table and she reaches down and scratches him without looking.
I look at the kitchen.
At the bookshelves arranged by preference instead of height, the photographs on the walls, the piano with its lid up. The scorch mark on the counter from week three that Beckett kept because it was evidence of something real.
At Beckett across the table with his coffee and his ring that matches mine and his eyes that have been bright since five-twenty on the front porch.
At Maisie eating toast and planning announcement logistics with a piece of toast in one hand and Rowdy on his feet.
At the ranch through the kitchen window, Silver Mesa in the Sunday morning light, twelve hundred acres of Texas that started as a listing photograph and became the whole shape of everything.
"Hey," Beckett says quietly.
I look at him.
He's smiling across the kitchen table. The full one. All the way up to his eyes.
"Good morning," he says.
I look at my ring, my family.
"Really good morning," I say.
