Kelsey had her head against the window and her hand in mine and she was humming something low, not quite a song yet. That was how she processed things. She’d told me once that the hum was where the melody was before she knew what it was about.
I wondered what this one would become.
Mom’s cabin was decorated outside with flowers, and through the windows I could see lights. Jules, almost certainly. I was choosing not to think too specifically about what else my nineteen-year-old sister had prepared inside, on the grounds that some things were better left unexamined.
Kelsey stepped out of the car and stood looking up at it, and her whole face did the thing it did when something was too much and she needed a second to hold it.
“I’m so happy we’re spending the night here,” she said. “You’re going to have to thank your dad for letting us use it.”
“We really don’t,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Dad and I talked,” I said. “He cleared it with my siblings. It was always his plan to give all of us space on this mountain, and he figured we should get a head start since it’s already ours in every way that matters.” I paused. “It’s actually ours now, Kels. The deed and everything.”
Her bottom lip did something.
“This cabin is ours,” she said.
“Ours,” I confirmed. “We can expand it. Real bedroom. A shower I can fit under. Loft for the kids someday.”
“Not as many as Chris and Trixie,” she said.
“God, no.” I took her hand. “I just want a reasonable human number of children.”
“Two.”
“Two’s good.”
“Maybe three.”
“Maybe three,” I agreed.
She walked up the steps and I followed her, and I pushed open the door to the cabin where my parents had fallen in love on a snowed-in night and where I had proposed to Kelsey on a Thanksgiving and where we had told each other the truth of our feelings for the first time.
The inside was warm and lit soft. Flowers on the table. The good blanket from the chest that I knew Nana had driven up personally because she didn’t trust anyone else to know which one it was.
Kelsey turned around in the middle of the room and looked at me.
“Hi,” she said.
It kept meaning something new every time.
“Hi, wife,” I said.
“Hi, husband.” She crossed the room and put her hands flat on my chest. “I have been waiting all day to get you alone.”
“Me too,” I said. Which was an understatement on the order of calling the Rocky Mountains a slight incline, but I was working on that.
I kissed her, slow and intentional, my hands finding the back of her neck and staying there.
“The dress,” she said against my mouth. “There’s a zipper somewhere.”
I found it. Or I found what I thought was it, which turned out to be a decorative detail and not structural in any way. I tried the other side. Also decorative.
“How many buttons are on this thing,” I said.
“A reasonable amount.”
