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“What are you doing?”
He went over to her and snatched her burden off of her arms.
“I wanted to bring a few of the extra flavors of preserves with me.”
“You don’t need to carry all that,” he said.
“Don’t start treating me like I’m fragile. You know, pregnant women can keep doing most of the same things they did before unless there are extreme circumstances.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about pregnant women. How do you?”
“The internet,” she said, sniffing.
He shrugged. “Okay. That...seems reasonable.”
She laughed. “Of course, I did a whole bunch of mad reading right when I found out. That’s how I knew about the one cup of coffee.”
“Fine then. How about it’s not for your health, it’s just the point of having a husband.”
She grinned up at him happily, and he...just stopped. Everything in him stopped. Had anyone ever looked at him like that?
Not in his memory.
Well. It was different, but there had been a time when...when he’d figured that he had that kind of safe space. When he figured that there was someone who cared a lot about him. A respite from the danger in the house.
His mom.
Army men and broken promises.
Shit. This whole impending-parenthood thing was really getting under his skin.
Making him think too much about the past.
He probably shouldn’t have taken her up to that picnic spot. He hadn’t been up there in...years. But that was where his mom would take them all sometimes. For an outing, she’d said, but he had the feeling it was mostly just to get away from their dad.
She’d left them.
And that was hitting him harder and harder these days.
He knew that had to do with the baby. Watching the way that Alaina was embracing motherhood, even though it was unexpected. And his own convictions about how the kid needed stability.
“We should go early,” Alaina said. “Because my sisters will have everything to set up.”
“Sure,” he said.
He was not one who ever went early to the town hall. Mostly because he was never part of the refreshments. The Sullivans tended to host because they had a barn most suited to housing that many people. And while they traded around who provided all the food, they tended to do a lot of it. As did the women in the Garrett household these days.
The Kings were reliable for barbecue. And the McClouds tended to contribute...store-bought things.
It was strange, because he’d spent any number of years rejecting domesticity of any kind, and now his house was a hive of it.
And it was making him want to give some things back. And he didn’t know how to do them.
But he agreed to go early with her, and they got into the truck, where he unburdened himself of the baskets, and took the quick drive over to Sullivan’s Point.
It hit him then, that the women fluttering around in the field by the barn were his sisters-in-law. It hit him that the family had expanded. It was just the strangest damn thing. Because there had been separation in all this. Compartments where he had kept everything, and now the lines were starting to blur. He was trying to sleep with Alaina, and not be... Whatever that could become. But she was his wife. And it was harder and harder to pretend she wasn’t his wife for real. There was all this space inside of him. Distance that he was working to maintain. For obvious reasons. Reasons that were obvious to him, anyway. And it just...seemed a little bit shaded here.
“Hey,” Fia said, waving as they both got out of the truck, him taking the baskets again.
