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Her warmth, her smell… it’s familiar. It’s mine.
This is where I belong.
Not in the oblivion I once craved.
I close my eyes, and the blackness is there, behind my eyelids, and once upon a time, I would have disappeared in it gladly. Tonight, though, I think about my wife. I think about my daughter. I think about the life in Mila’s belly. I think of sunshine. I don’t know when I finally fall back to sleep.
All I know is that I do.
8
Chapter Seven
Mila
The Mansion, as Pax and I call it, is flooded with movers.
“Where would you like this, m’am?” one asks me. He’s holding a box clearly marked “Nightstand.”
“In the master bedroom,” I tell him patiently. I start to pick up a box, but Pax is walking through the door and he eyes me. I stand back up, my hands empty.
“I can’t believe they were able to renovate the master in just a month,” I say to divert his attention. “It’s incredible.”
“Well, it was my grandfather’s for fifty years. It needed a facelift,” he answers. He pulls me to him. “I paid them extra to have it done in time for you.”
I kiss him softly.
“We’re going to be ok here,” I assure him. “I don’t want you to worry. Wherever you are, it’s home.”
“You’re just trying to distract me from lecturing you about resting,” he tells me.
“I hate that you know me so well.”
He chuckles. “Ha. Get used to it.”
“Are you going to work?”
He nods. He’d been off for a couple of weeks to recover, but now that he’s healing up, he’s back in the swing of things. “Yeah. Roger’s probably waiting outside right now.”
“Ok. Have a great day. Hopefully a lot will be done by the time you get home.”
“Not by you though,” he says sternly.
“Ok. Not by me.”
He’s out the door before I know it, and I’m alone again with the movers. Maddy took Zuzu for a playdate with Eli, so I can actually rest for a minute.
I drop into a chair in the formal living room, and put my feet up on the gleaming coffee table in front of me.
“M’am, that is an antique,” a voice says to me.
I turn my head to find the housekeeper, Natasha, in the doorway. She’s troubled, I can tell, by my disregard for the formal furniture.
“I know,” I tell her gently. “But my home is to be lived in, not looked at.”
She moves across the room, and I find myself wondering, once again, why such a young woman would want to be a housekeeper for an elderly man like William. She’s around thirty, slender, pretty with long caramel hair that she keeps twisted into a bun.
“Would you like some chamomile tea?” she asks. “You seem stressed.”
