I laughed, quiet, and his arm pulled me closer. The baby kicked again, a flutter, gentle, settling down. The room was dark, warm. His chest was solid against my back.
I rolled over to face him. His face was close, inches away, his eyes dark in the low light. I could see the scar on his eyebrow, the stubble along his jaw, the way his amber eyes caught what little light there was.
“I’m still scared,” I said.
He didn’t rush to answer. He looked at me, taking the words seriously instead of brushing them away.
“Of what?”
“Of this. Of letting you back in. Of trusting you and being wrong again.” I swallowed. “I kissed you last night and my first thought this morning was ‘what if he does it again’ and I hate that my brain does that. But it does.”
“Andrea...”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel guilty. I’m saying it because it’s true and you should know.”
He was quiet. His hand was on my belly, the baby still against his palm now, settled.
“I’ll be here until you’re not scared anymore,” he said. “If that takes a year, or five, or the rest of our lives, I’ll still be here.”
“That’s a big promise.”
“I’ve broken bigger ones. I’d rather spend the rest of my life proving this one than break another.”
I looked at him. His face was open, unguarded, the face he only showed me when nobody else was watching. I believed him. Believing him was terrifying because the last time I believed him I ended up on a bathroom floor in Whitebrook with a positive pregnancy test and a broken heart.
But lying here with his hand wrapped around me and his breath on my face, I believed him anyway.
I tucked my face into his neck and closed my eyes. His arm pulled me closer, carefully, around the belly. His chin rested on the top of my head.
I slept. Better than I had in months. Deep, heavy, dreamless, with his heartbeat against my forehead and his hand on our son and thirty feet of hallway reduced to nothing.
39
— • —
Andrea
I woke up alone in his bed.
Our bed, technically, since I’d stopped going back to the guest room a week ago and neither of us had acknowledged the shift out loud. My clothes had migrated into his closet. My books were on his nightstand. The peonies he kept replacing were on the dresser instead of down the hall. We just let it happen, the way you let a river change course, not by deciding but by stopping pretending it wasn’t already going that way.
I could hear his voice from somewhere nearby, low and serious, and I lay there trying to figure out who he was on the phone with at seven in the morning. I got up, pulled on his shirt because mine didn’t fit over the belly anymore, and followed the voice down the hall to the nursery.
The door was open. Finneas was inside, standing in front of the crib we’d assembled last weekend, arms crossed, his tone the same one he used in council sessions. He wasn’t on the phone. He was talking to the crib.
“The northern border patrol needs restructuring,” he was saying. “Aldric wants to keep the rotation at two weeks but I think monthly is more efficient. Less strain on the patrol families.” He paused like he was waiting for a response. “Your thoughts?”
I leaned against the doorframe and pressed my hand over my mouth.
“And the housing allocation for the new families needs to be finalized before winter. Luca’s handling the paperwork but the council wants my sign-off, and Brennan has opinions about the western plots that I don’t agree with but he’s not entirely wrong. Which is annoying.”
I couldn’t hold it. A laugh escaped through my fingers.
He turned and saw me in the doorway, his shirt hanging to my thighs, my belly round underneath it. His face didn’t change, not even a flicker of embarrassment.
“I’m briefing Alex on pack business.”
“He’s not born yet.”
