She didn’t apologize. Not directly. She wrote around the apology the way she’d always done, building a case for sympathy without ever actually saying the words. I could almost admire the technique if it wasn’t so goddamn infuriating.
I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. I didn’t know what to do with it yet. Part of me thought about showing it to Finneas, but not today. Reopening that wound on his son’s birthday would be cruel and pointless. He’d grieved his mother in our kitchen with his forehead on my shoulder and tears on my neck and he’d made his peace with it. I wasn’t going to undo that with a letter that couldn’t even manage the word sorry.
I’d figure it out. Tomorrow, next week, whenever the right moment came. Or maybe there wasn’t a right moment for something like this.
I put the envelope in my back pocket. Put my hand on my stomach.
“What are you thinking about?”
I turned. Finneas was behind me, leaning against the porch post, arms crossed, frosting still on his sleeve. His hair was messy from Alex grabbing it and there was a grass stain on his knee from crawling after our son on the lawn.
“I’m thinking about how much I hated you when we first met,” I said.
“You didn’t hate me.”
“You communicated in grunts and glares for two years. And the sticky notes. ‘Tomorrow, no excuses.’ Who writes that to a person?”
“You delivered it ahead of schedule.”
“Because I’m excellent at my job. That’s separate from the hating.”
He smiled. The real one.
I watched his face and thought about the first time I saw that smile, really saw it, through the glass wall at the office the day I put a pink Post-It on his coffee mug. I thought about reading to a dog on my porch and not knowing the dog was listening. I thought about a parking garage where I fell apart and a bathroom floor where a pregnancy test told me my life was about to change. A grandmother’s lawn in the rain. A bassinet with a label I had to point out six times. A supply room where I told him I was happy and he kissed me and tasted like ice cream.
All of it. Every stupid, painful, beautiful piece of it. Leading here.
“Come here,” I said.
He pushed off the porch post. I took his hand and pressed it against my belly. Not the flat belly I had when I first started working for him. Not the huge belly I had when Alex was born. A new belly. Early. Barely there.
But there.
He looked at his hand on my stomach. Looked at my face. I watched it click, the same sequence from the anatomy scanparking lot: confusion, realization, then something that cracked his whole face open.
“Happy birthday to our son,” I said. “And congratulations to his dad.”
He stared at me. I held his gaze and let the dimple show.
He laughed. Not the quiet one, not the almost-smile. A full, loud, head-back laugh that carried across the lawn and made Mary swing the camera toward us and Buddy bark in solidarity. He picked me up and I yelped and he spun me once, carefully, his hands firm on my waist, his face split open with the biggest grin I’d ever seen on him.
He set me down, took my face in both hands, and kissed me. Slow, deep, his thumbs on my cheekbones, a kiss that made my knees go soft. I could feel his joy through the bond, bright, enormous, crashing against my own until I couldn’t tell which was mine and which was his.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. His eyes were wet. “Thank you,” he said, his voice rough. “For Alex. For this one. For giving me a family I didn’t know how to ask for.”
“You asked. You just did it badly. With grunts.”
He laughed again, shorter, wetter. He pressed his forehead against mine. “You’re incredible. You know that?”
“I do know that. Nice of you to catch up.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. Now put me down before Buddy finds the chicken.”
“Again?” he said.
“Again.”
