Page 32 of Until You

I nod, even though they can’t see me.

“Okay.”

We hang up.

I sit in the quiet for a long time. The house breathes around me. The old bones of it settling, the way houses do at night. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. A branch taps the window in a rhythm that’s almost like knocking.

I pick up the next photo from the box.

It’s Mimz and Pops at what looks like a hospital. She’s in a bed, exhausted, hair plastered to her forehead. He’s sitting on the edge of the mattress, leaning close, and cradled between them is a baby.

Their first child.

Their first moment as parents.

His hand is on the baby’s head, so large it covers nearly the entire skull. And she’s looking at him—not at the baby, at him—with an expression that says look what we made. Look what we did.

On the back of the photo, in Mimz’s penciled handwriting, is the name James. I stare at it for a long time. James is Oliver’s dad.

I set it gently on the scanner, close the lid, and watch the light sweep across.

Later. Much later. After midnight.

I’m in the kitchen getting water—the baby demands hydration at unreasonable hours, apparently—when I hear his door open.

I freeze with my glass under the faucet.

Footsteps. The bathroom. The faucet running.

Then footsteps again. But they don’t go back to his room.

They come down the hallway.

I should move. I should go back to my room. I should not be standing here in an oversized T-shirt that barely covers my thighs with my hair in a mess and my hand on my stomach the way I’ve started doing without thinking, that unconscious protective gesture I can’t seem to stop.

I pull my hand away from my belly. Fast. Guilty.

He rounds the corner.

We both stop.

He’s in a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants. Which, let’s be honest, is a criminal combination on a man built like him. His hair is mussed from the pillow, those dark curls going in every direction. Without the boots, without the jeans, without the cowboy armor, he looks younger. Softer. More like the man who’d laughed in the green neon light of that bar and less like the one who’d accused me of tracking him across Texas. For his money.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

We stand there. The faucet drips.

“Water,” I say, holding up my glass like evidence.

“Same.” He moves to the cabinet. He knows which one, of course, he does. He pulls down a glass and fills it at the sink. We stand side by side in the dark kitchen, drinking water at midnight like two strangers in a hostel.

Except we’re not strangers. That’s the problem. We know exactly one version of each other—the version that exists in a sealed truck cab on a rainy night with the windows fogged and the world shut out. A night punctuated by the sounds of pleasure and skin slapping against skin. And now we’re trying to pretend that version doesn’t determine every single interaction we have in this house.

“Pot roast was good,” he says.

“Mimz’s recipe.”