She’d stood watching, taking pictures, laughing with tears in her eyes, feeling as though she were simultaneously standingwithin the moment and standing outside it, a passive observer. Surely, this wasn’t her life? She’d never dreamed of marriage, never picked out names for her fantasy children. Surely this happily ever after had found her by mistake?
She was loading the dishwasher that night, after the destroyed cake had been cleared away, as Khash gave the birthday boy his bath. Lurielle glanced at her phone, noticing a missed text from her mother.
Thinking of you and our boy today.
Thinking of you.Now that you matter. Now that I’ve deemed you worthy of my attention.She hadn’t realized until after she closed the washer door that her mother hadn’t even wished Kael a happy birthday.
Because that’s not why she’s texting you. Lurielle already knew. Her mother was seeking the response. Was seeking the validation that came with being perceived as a good grandmother, which was evidently achieved via text message and the occasional phone call.
The first video call with her mother had gone exactly as well as she had assumed. All of that big energy, the daily phone calls and messages, thenow that you’re important to mesubtext, the attitude that Lurielle had finally done something right, something of which she could boast . . . well, it had not goneentirelycrashing down, not the way Lurielle had feared.
More like that little candle being blown out. A wavering light one moment, and a puff of smoke the next. Disappointment. Expectations unmet.
She genuinely thought her mother was assuming that shewasn’tgoing to give birth to an orc as if Khash were incidental. She had watched her mother’s face closely on the tablet screen, watched the rapid blinking of her eyes as she saw her little grandson for the first time, chubby cheeks and dark hair, bigchocolate brown eyes like his daddy, his skin the soft color of a new leaf.
She had seen enough.
When her mother stopped calling every day, Lurielle was unsurprised. For the best, she told herself. That was what she told Despina in therapy. That’s what she repeated to herself in the mirror. What she whispered into Kael’s feather-soft hair as she put him to bed that night.
She was never going to be her mother. And it was for the best.
And now she had peed on her hand again, and the tremulous shape of the routine they’d been building was another little candle flame, just as easily extinguished.
“Were you joking about wanting another one?”
Khash ducked his head around the doorway, eyebrows drawn together, his mouth full of toothpaste. She grinned as he turned back into the bathroom, rinsed and spit.
“Lurielle, what kind of question is that to give a man when he’s trying to settle down for the night? You better be naked under those covers if you’re gonna taunt me that way.”
“I’m not taunting!” she laughed. “I’m just asking. You said you did, before he was born. Do you still?”
She thought about his big family — noisy, bickering, so many expectations, so many opportunities for failure. She tried to envision her perfect little sunny house withtwolittle ones, underfoot, fighting with each other, throwing toys, spilling food. She didn’t have any sort of relationship with her brother. She didn’t understand sibling bonds, not the way Khash did.
But then again, she could also picture Kael, a little older, looking at a book with a little brother or sister beside him, coloring with a sibling at his little table, two of them running and giggling outside. She didn’t understand it, but she could still see it so clearly.
The bed jostled as Khash climbed into it, stretching out beside her. His voice was careful.
“It’s a lot to consider, darlin’. I don’t feel like we’ve even found our feet yet. Don’t go listening to my family trying to bully you into something. We both love what we do. We’re not the couple who are gonna piss and moan about going back to work. I’ll be honest, staying home with him . . . I didn’t think I was gonna make it.”
She began to laugh in the darkness, envisioning him overwhelmed with the baby in the middle of the day on his own, lunch tipped over, toys everywhere, spit-up on his tailored suits.
“You go on and laugh. I loved every minute of it. I wish I’d gotten the same time that you did with him. That don’t mean I wasn’t ready to put my suit back on by the end of it. And I know you were too.”
“I love my job,” she confirmed. Speaking it into the space of their bedroom made it take on weight in a different way than it did in her head. “I genuinely love it. I love using my brain, and I love solving complex problems. I love building things. Do you know what happens when a woman leaves the workplace to care for her children? She leaves the workplace and the door closes behind her. It doesn’t matter the species. The workplace doesn’t stop moving. By the time she goes back to it, she’s missed five years or more. If I were to miss five years, I’d have to go back to school. The way tech is advancing? Five years of hands-on practical experience with whatever the new tools are by then. Five years of promotions. You can’t ever regain that ground once you lose it. I’m not saying that’s the correct choice. It’s not the choice for everyone. But right now it’s the choice I want to make. Because if I don’t, I’m the one who has to live with the ramifications of it for a long, long time.”
That, too, held a different weight when she said it out loud.
“Lurielle, I would never ask you to stay home. I know you better than that, darlin’. You said yourself — schools here are excellent. The daycare is too. There’s nothing wrong with the way we’re doing it. You don’t need to look at my family as a blueprint.”
“What am I supposed to look at then? Because I sure as fuck can’t look at my own family blueprint.”
Khash chuckled into the space between them, and she edged closer, closing the distance. “We’re not getting any younger, Lurielle. At least, I’m not.”
Her face heated, tears burning their way into existence. “So did you mean it? When you said you wanted another one?”
“Bluebell—”
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted, tears overflowing. She didn’t know if they were happy tears or just terrified tears. She was going to lose another version of herself, she realized.
