She smiles. “With us. With him. With all of this.” She gestures vaguely at the table. The noise. The chaos. The warmth.
I swallow.
Geoff squeezes my fingers, once. Not looking at me. He doesn’t need to.
“I think,” Elizabeth continues, “that sometimes people confuse worth with polish. But polish wears off. Character doesn’t.”
I feel my throat tighten.
“Well,” Ivy says brightly, clearly sensing the emotional temperature rising and deciding to intervene before anyone cries into a scone, “this is all very touching, but I’d like it noted that the chocolate éclair is objectively the best pastry here.”
Elizabeth nods. “Correct.”
Lucy looks up. “I like the pink one.”
Theo leans down to her. “You may like the pink one. You may not declare war over it.”
She sighs. “Fine.”
I lean back in my chair, surrounded by noise and laughter and children and women who don’t shrink themselves. Geoff’s family. My family, apparently.
And, for the first time in a very long time, I don’t feel like I’m waiting for something to go wrong.
I feel like I’ve arrived.
The kitchen smells like garlic, lemon and whatever confidence Geoff has decided to sprinkle into a frying pan.
He’s standing at the hob, sleeves rolled up, brow faintly furrowed in concentration as he coaxes a chicken breast into behaving itself. There’s a glass of whisky nearby that he is absolutely not drinking from because he’s taking this seriously. Cooking-for-the-pregnant-woman seriously.
I’m perched on one of the stools at the island, feet hooked around the rung, hands resting on my stomach like it’s a habit I didn’t consciously pick up but now can’t stop doing.
It’s quiet. Comfortable. The good kind of quiet that doesn’t itch.
I watch him flip the chicken, precise but relaxed, and something in my chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with timing.
“Geoff,” I say suddenly.
He glances over his shoulder. “If this is about the chicken being underdone, I swear it’s still cooking.”
“No,” I say. “Stop. Please.”
That gets his attention.
He turns the heat down, sets the pan aside and gives me his full attention, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed.
“You’ve said please,” he says. “That’s ominous.”
I swallow. This feels bigger out loud than it did in my head. I hadn’t planned it. It’s just arrived, fully formed, like an inconvenient truth.
“I realised something today,” I say.
His expression shifts. Not alarmed. Just open. Ready.
“Okay,” he says gently. “What?”
I take a breath.
“I think,” I say slowly, “that I might be in love with you.”
