Page 79 of Fall Love

Can he tell what I did last night? I slept with Tate. Does that make me bad?

He watches me while my sister opens the main door to the garage, leaving the welcome sign permanently turned to CLOSED.

“I think your dad would understand,” Saint offers softly.

I could argue that Saint didn’t know my dad. He has no idea how crushed Dad would be about the sale. How disappointed Dad might be in me. Almost forty and pregnant, and now without the family business.

“Change is difficult.” He gazes toward the sky, as if an answer is up there. In some ways, it is because the temperature is shifting, and autumn hangs in the atmosphere. He glances back at me. “Change is also inevitable. And sometimes, it’s exactly what we need.”

I smile. “Says the man in love with my sister.”

“Exactly.” He smiles back at me.

Their love has changed both of them, and their love was exactly what the other needed. Lumi deserves all the happiness in the world. She took on the role of mother when the twins and I were still teens. When she became a mother herself, she still took care of Dad. She handled the business books for years, so she knew where the garage stood financially.

But Dad is gone.

Danny is grown and off in New York.

My sisters and I are adults.

Selling off the garage takes one more load off Lumi’s shoulders. She’s freer than she’s been in years. And happier, too.

I’m slightly envious. I want to be happy as well.

I rub my hand over my belly before I trudge up to the entrance with heavy feet and step into the garage for one of the last times.

Over the next two days, we collect invoices and receipts, boxing up anything and everything we think might be important for a final tax statement. Lumi will store the boxes in her garage.

As we dig through file cabinets, we uncover memory after memory. Old titles for the property. Blueprints for the garage. Original receipts from a time long gone. Black and white photographs stuffed between ancient tax bills.

I don’t want to part with a thing, and I wish I had space for the metal office desk. Heck, I’d even settle for an orange plastic waiting room chair. But my house is only so big and already furnished.

Instead, I take a few tools. Those original blueprints. A set of crescent wrenches I’ll never use. A rusty welding mask and Dad’s uniform shirt. The one that hung on the back of the office door.

The items hardly fill a box. Sixty-something years of business reduced to a small collection of trinkets.

My sad is sad, and I’m so emotionally exhausted by the end of day two, I don’t take Saint and Lumi up on their offer to grab dinner together.

I just want to shower and climb into bed, which is exactly what I do, wearing the flannel shirt Tate gave me only yesterday morning. Curled on my side, pillow between my knees, I stare at the dark wall in my bedroom.

Tate sent me texts over the past two days and even called me last night, but I let it go to voicemail.

Yesterday, I responded, telling him I was tired, and I planned to go to bed early. The excuse was lame as I tossed and turned, Little Wrench deciding it was soccer practice time. Didn’t matter because my mind was like a ball being kicked all over an empty field.

Tate. Dad. The garage. The baby.

What am I going to do in the future?

I’m too exhausted to think about tomorrow. Or the next day. And I used the same excuse tonight—tired, early to bed—to avoid seeing Tate.

My eyes finally close. My body sinks into the mattress. When a light tapping comes to my front door. I’ve fallen into the weightiness of heavy dozing, where I’m conscious of things outside of me, but too foggy and lethargic to move, so I hope whoever it is will go away.

Then, I hear the doorknob twist and the soft call of my name. I still don’t answer, deciding I’m dreaming.

Tate couldn’t possibly be letting himself into my house. Finding the spare key I not so discreetly keep under a planter next to the front door. He isn’t standing beside my bed, whispering my name again, then crawling on it, and scooting up behind me, lining his body up along mine.

Chest to my back. Knees behind mine. Feet beneath my feet. He spreads his palm wide and runs it over my belly, settling it there.