“You said yes.”
“I’m aware of what I said. Eat your eggs.”
He ate his eggs. I could see him fighting the grin and losing. His whole face was doing the thing where it tried to stay neutral and failed completely, half surprise, half barely contained joy, and I looked away because if I kept watching his face I was going to take it back just to regain the upper hand.
That evening he set up dinner on the estate grounds. Fairy lights strung between the trees near the garden, a table for two, candles that flickered in the warm air. The dogs from the rescue wing were wandering the lawn because nobody had closed the gate, and Buddy was lying under the table with his chin on my foot like he’d appointed himself chaperone.
Finneas was nervous. I could tell because he kept adjusting the silverware, lining up the knife edge with the plate, moving the candle an inch to the left, moving it back. His knee was bouncing under the table hard enough that I could feel it through the ground.
“You’re nervous,” I said.
“I’m not.”
“Your knee is shaking the table.”
He put his hand on his knee. It stopped. “I want this to go well.”
“It’s dinner. We’ve eaten dinner together hundreds of times.”
“Not like this.”
He was right. Not like this. Not with fairy lights, candles, a deliberate yes between us. A date I agreed to, a choice I made with my eyes open, my walls cracking, my heart doing things I couldn’t pretend were co-parenting.
He’d made the food himself, which I didn’t expect. Pasta, simple, with a sauce that was actually good. I took a bite and stared at him.
“You can cook?”
“I learned. In Whitebrook, at the hotel. Got tired of takeout every night.”
“You learned to cook because you were bored?”
“I learned to cook because I was eating alone in a hotel room every night staring at an ultrasound photo. Turns out that’s motivating.”
I didn’t have a sarcastic response for that one. The image of him alone in a hotel room teaching himself pasta hit me somewhere I wasn’t ready for.
“This is good,” I admitted. “Genuinely good. I’m annoyed about it.”
“You’re annoyed that I can cook.”
“I’m annoyed that you added it to the list. The list of things that make it harder to stay mad at you, which was already too long.”
He didn’t say anything to that but the corner of his mouth twitched and I saw the satisfaction in it and I pointed my fork at him.
“Don’t look smug.”
“I’m not looking smug.”
“You’re looking extremely smug.”
“I’m looking at you. If that happens to look smug, that’s your interpretation.”
We ate. The conversation drifted to the baby, to names. I’d been turning it over for weeks, trying on different ones, saying them out loud in the shower to see how they felt in my mouth.
“I want to name him Alexander,” I said. “It was my dad’s middle name. Michael Alexander Grey.”
He was quiet for a second, his fork resting against his plate, letting the name settle. “Alexander. Alex.”
“If that’s okay with you.”
