Page 137 of The Difference Between

“Why didn’t you finish?” I ask him. “Live here?”

“Felt too hard after Greg died,” Gavin admits. “He haunted it.” He shrugs, looking around the shop. “If I couldn’t work here then I sure as hell couldn’t live here. I needed time. Get my head on straight.” His eyes meet mine. “Find the right inspiration.”

I tuck my chin to my shoulder until the urge to smile passes. “A lesser person might gloat about being the hero twice in a person’s story.”

He chuckles.

A shelf of glass flowers and other small objects catch my eye. I take the few steps to examine them, picking up an elongated teardrop sculpture swirled with color. A paperweight, I assume. I wrap my fingers around it—it has a satisfying fit in my palm—then, still cupping it, return to the spot next to Gavin. “I bet Amanda loved it in here.”

“She did.”

It’s a comfort and jab. Twenty-some years ago we promised we’d be having porch wine together right now. I wouldn’t have believed I’d be asking a third party what she liked before she died.

Her absence fills the air until Gavin grabs my empty hand and rubs small circles on my knuckle with his thumb. “You want to talk about Sunday?”

“About how you said I had a heart made of ice and was—how did you put it?” I tap my chin with the paperweight. “Ah—trying to create a genetically perfect child to control after I forbid you to love me? That what you want to talk about?”

He laughs through a breath and drops my hand to fold his arms over his chest. “Yeah.”

He’s handsome standing here. The low lights dancing in his eyes and the easy way he’s smiling even though our last conversation wasn’t much different than a gunfight.

“No,” I admit. “But we can.”

He quirks a brow. “And you’ll be honest?”

I pin him with a look and he rubs his nose. Touché.

“Results are black and white in business,” I start, fidgeting with the paperweight. “That’s why it comes so easy to me. I win or I lose. Everything else . . . relationships.” I eye him. “People complicate things, but . . . being back here has lifted the veil on what I’ve been missing.”

I will never tell Rue, but she and Nash have been the most revealing. Their looks and touches. Bennie. Them trying for a baby. Together. It’ll likely take them longer because they’re older and Rue’s diet is atrocious, but they’ll do it together. I want that.

“And yes,” I continue. “I lied and stole medical information—” I grip the piece of glass in my hands a little tighter. “But I want a baby. I want to know what it feels like to be pregnant then see myself in someone else. Love someone and be loved back.”

Gavin takes a step so he’s directly in front of me, palms on the edge of the marver on either side of my hips.

I set the paperweight beside me and trace his jaw with my finger. “I know you say you don’t care about age, but I might only have a few years left to do this. That’s a real thing I have to think of. It’s not me being controlling, it’s a deadline. Just because you want kids someday doesn’t mean I can operate like that. It’s what I’m doing now.”

That reality is as audible as the whoosh of the furnace filled with hot glass. I’m running out of time and he’s not in a position to do anything about it. Me having a baby with a stranger is one thing—but with a partner in the mix? That’s a guaranteed life of compromise. With the right person, I’d do it, but I’ve only known Gavin over a month—people don’t consciously have babies with someone after a month. Even Rue and Nash made it two months, and that was on accident.

My fingers find the worn shard of glass hanging from his neck, and both of our gazes go to it. The piece I gave him all those years ago.

He hoists me onto the table, lifting the skirt of my dress up to my knees so he can step between them.

“It doesn’t change things for me,” he says. His hands move from my hips to my face, pushing my hair away and rubbing my cheeks with his thumbs. “I have custody of Addie. Legally, she’s mine. Forever. And I’m thirty. You think I want to wait to have kids until I’m old and forty?”

“Hey!” I slap his chest, and he laughs. “I’m being vulnerable, you ass.”

His smile stays. “I am too. I don’t care, Reese. Just no more stakeouts or trying to break my nose.”

I laugh a little but swoon a lot.

He’s fine.

With me.

Despite the fact I punched him and stole medical information and forgot to fill my life with people, he wants me. And the baby I’m going to have.

“How do we do this?” Panic tangles between my ribs like invasive vines of kudzu. “How do we—” I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them, he’s right there. Steady and smiling, meeting me where I am and consuming me in flames as he does. “So we’re clear, you know I want a baby and I have a job in Chicago, and I know you live here. I won’t drag you into any more closets, I get that, but I don’t know how to do this or firmly say what comes next without thinking it all through.”