Page 101 of Make it a Double

- Cool Ranch Doritos with nacho cheese sauce (red label)

- Spicy pickles

Because the baby was due in less than a month, and there was a very real chance Sawyer could deliver early with her condition, we made the decision to go ahead and start moving her things over. Most of it would stay with us at the cabin, but the baby furniture was going straight to our new place.

There was still a lot that needed to be done in our home, but Lukas was already on the job. We met on Monday to look over mock-ups he had stashed away. Since this house had been with his family for so long, he had plenty to choose from. Each one was carefully designed to elevate the original architecture while updating it to basic modern standards, such as a dishwasher.

A must for Sawyer.

Tuesday was paint samples. Sawyer walked the aisles, eyes sparkling as she ran her hand along the swatches. It was little things, like picking paint, that had me falling more in love with her every day. She was full of joy as she spoke animatedly about color schemes and aesthetics. There was a theme for every room—plans she’d spent her whole life making that now she would be able to bring to life. I didn’t really understand much of what she was saying, so I just decided to nod and hand her my card at the check-out line.

The original paint tested positive for lead, but Lukas had already taken care of it. His crew had repainted the rest of the house already, save for one room.

The only thing Sawyer was dead set on was taking care of the nursery ourselves. It didn’t matter that neither of us knew what we were doing, and there was a real chance it would look like shit. She said it’d always been a dream of hers. Who was I to deny her? My one concession was having the crew take care of taping off the edges. I didn’t trust myself to make the lines straight, and there was no way I was letting her on the stepladder to do it.

“Is that the last one?” I asked.

Sawyer finished taping a cardboard box and glanced up to see me leaning against the doorframe. She let out a long exhale as she leaned back on the bed. “For now. We’ll still need to go through the rest of my stuff once we finish the nursery.”

“That’s fine. I can come back by tomorrow and grab whatever’s left,” I said.

We spent most of the morning loading the sum total of her life into a handful of boxes. Most of the space had been taken up by mountains of baby supplies. Sawyer hadn’t been wrong, Liv was going a little overboard. It didn’t include the gifts she got us at the baby shower, either.

I glanced around, looking at what was left. It was a little overwhelming to think about one tiny human needing all of this stuff. There were so many clothes in different sizes that I wasn’t sure how we were supposed to label everything. And don’t get me started on the number of toys we had no idea what to do with. Maybe we could ask Lukas to build a matching storage unit just to store our stockpile of diapers.

Everything had moved so fast since Lukas handed me the keys last week. Olivia and I met the next day, where she handed me a fully prepared contract. The asking price left me feeling uneasy. It was far under market value, and she knew it. When I argued with her, she threatened to tear up the contract on site and gift the damn thing to Sawyer, so I couldn’t fight her on it.

In the end, we both signed on the dotted line, and I wrote her a check for a quarter of a million dollars from my trust. I’d spent every day since waiting for a phone call from my father, which still hadn’t come.

Richard had already contacted Montgomery Holdings to tell him that he had approved the Bennetts’ proposal and issued the necessary permits. Neither of us had been surprised that he hadn’t taken it well. Richard elected to step away from his current position before my father could drop a headline about bribery in small-town government offices.

My phone should’ve rung the moment his call with Richard ended. If the permits were issued, that meant I failed. We didn’t have any other bargaining chips to play against Olivia and Duke. My father should’ve wanted to throw my failures back in my face. To remind me why I would never be as successful as he was. He’d done it before, and those were deals he didn’t even really want.

So, why hadn’t he called?

Technically, he’d given me till the end of April to finish the job. We still had a week to go, according to those terms, and I planned to use every one of them to make sure I’d never have to set foot in New York again. I’d already contacted a moving company to pack up my penthouse in the city. All the furniture would go into storage until we figured out what we wanted to do with it. I wanted to make sure Sawyer could decorate our place however she wanted.

She could paint the walls hot pink or hang flowers from the ceiling, and I wouldn’t care so long as it made her happy.

Sawyer looked around at the boxes stacked all around her childhood bedroom. She’d lived her entire life here, never knowing anything else. I couldn’t imagine what that must’ve been like. I left home the moment I turned eighteen and never looked back. My dad immediately converted my childhood bedroom to a poker room, stripping away any sign it’d been my prison cell.

The moment her lips drew in tight, I pushed off the doorframe and crouched by her side. “It’s a lot, I know. If you aren’t ready, it’s okay. We don’t have to do any of this right now.” I might’ve caught some grumbles from Duke because of it, but that was fine. He didn’t scare me as much as he used to.

“God, no,” she said, laughing as she wiped a stray tear away. “It’s not about that, it’s just…” she paused, looking around the room once more before meeting my gaze. “This used to be my mom’s room. And it’s the only thing I really have of hers.”

I tried to think back on anything I knew about her mom, but came up blank. I wasn’t sure she’d ever even mentioned the woman before. It was always about her Grams. “Do you mind me asking what happened with her?”

Sawyer nodded, glancing down at her belly. “She had me not long after she graduated high school. According to Grams, she wasn’t really the maternal type, which was pretty clear when she left in the middle of the night with a half-assed apology on the back of a receipt.”

“Sugar, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, it’s okay. I’m not sad for myself, but I hate it for my grams. Her daughter just left one night and never called again. How could you do that to the two people you’re supposed to love more than anything?”

I wanted to be able to give her an answer, but the truth was that I’d been asking myself nearly the same question all my life. Some days, I felt genuine love and affection from my mother, but it felt guarded. Like she didn’t want to get too attached for fear it’d be ripped away. I wouldn’t put it past my father to dangle me over her head to keep her in line.

My father made it clear he didn’t give a shit about having a son. He cared about an heir. Nothing more, nothing less. And when I didn’t fall in line exactly like he wanted, there wasn’t an ounce of family understanding to be found.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s harder to wrap my head around now that I’m becoming a dad. I already love our son, and he isn’t even born yet. I can’t imagine how much that’s going to change when he is.”