Page 67 of Grim’s Angel

Grim lowers himself in front of me.

The last time I saw him on his knees, rain covered the windows of the Roseburn Falls bus station.

Three months after Rivers’s arrest, he took me back to the bench where I treated his shoulder. He placed the pistol I had used to shoot him beside me, unloaded this time, then held out a ring.

“The first choice I gave you here cost me blood,” he said. “I want all the ones that come next.”

I let him wait six seconds because a proposal that confident deserved consequences.

He still claims those seconds shortened his life.

Now his hands settle at my waist.

“A baby,” he says.

“That remains the diagnosis.”

He presses his mouth to my stomach through my sweater.

My humor deserts me.

I slide my fingers into his hair as he rests his forehead against me.

When he looks up, joy is there.

Fear sits beneath it.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he says.

“Yes, you do.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I have two years of evidence.”

His hands tighten slightly at my waist.

“What if there’s more of him in me than I think?”

Anthony.

I touch Grim’s face.

“Your father bought a woman to force his way into his son’s life. You handed a frightened woman a gun and stood still while she decided whether to trust you.”

“She shot me.”

“And look where you are now.”

His mouth moves, but the fear remains.

I hold his gaze.

“You built a second shelter when the first ran out of room, then refused to put your name on any part of it. You protect people without demanding that they belong to you afterward. You have spent every day of our marriage asking what I want, even when you dislike the answer.”

“That happens a lot.”

“You married an opinionated woman. The prognosis was clear.”