“I want ten!” Ethan opens his hands to show me all fingers. “And I want lots and lots of syrup!”
“You’ll explode if you eat ten pancakes.” I poke his stomach teasingly. “You’ll become a balloon and start floating away, and then I’ll have to run after you to catch you.”
“No I won’t!” He giggles.
“A huge balloon,” I insist, “and I’ll have to tie a rope around your leg and all the birds will become your friends.”
He just laughs as if I’m the funniest person in the world. “Okay. Five pancakes!”
“How about two and then we have a snack afterwards?” I suggest.
He makes a huge show of being disappointed but then nods.
As we sit down to eat, the silence between Grayson and me stretches. Ethan doesn’t seem to care. “Miranda?”
I look down. “Mm?”
He’s holding ChuChu’s ear, tilting the bear’s worn face up toward me with a small, earnest expression.
“Are you staying forever now?”
The fork stops moving in my hand.
The whole kitchen goes still for one beat. In front of me, I see Grayson’s coffee mug pause halfway to his mouth.
“For a while, buddy,” I answer.
“How long is a while?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But not forever.”
“I really don’t know.”
He thinks about this, frowning. Then he nods, peace made, and digs into his breakfast.
Later that day,Brooke’s couriered boxes arrive at the front gate.
Three of them. The sum of my life. Stacked on a hand truck, rolled up the gravel by a delivery driver who doesn’t look at the mansion behind me. Doesn’t ask why a hospital ID lanyard is taped to the top box.
Linda, who arrived just an hour after breakfast, carries the first two upstairs before I can stop her. I follow with the third pressed against my ribs. She sets the boxes inside Grayson’s bedroom door and turns to me.
“I’ve cleared the second sink in the bathroom for you, dear. There’s space in the closet on the left. You’ll want to hang anything that wrinkles. The drawers crease blouses.”
“Thank you, Linda.”
She pauses in the doorway and adds without quite meeting my eyes, “The right side of the bed has the better lamp. If you read at night.”
Then she leaves.
I stand in the middle of Grayson’s bedroom holding a box. Not for the first time today, I ask myself what I’m doing. How did I get all the way from treating Grayson’s wound and finding him so insufferable to now being his fake fiancée?
Sighing, I sit on the bed and open the box.
Brooke has folded my clothes with more care than I would have. There’s a note on top in her handwriting. Call me when you can. I love you. Don’t die. I press my mouth shut and put the note in the bedside drawer. If I look at it for one more second, I’ll lose my composure entirely.
Then I unpack.
