That I was just like my mother.
Left behind.
Trying to be enough for two people at once.
The thought made my throat tighten. I pushed it away before it could settle, before it could take root. I wasn’t my mother. I had the B&B. I had stability. I had a decade of savings and a business that kept me fed and a house that would still be standing long after I was gone. I had built something solid with my own hands.
I had fifteen years of learning how to survive.
My hand found its way to my belly without thinking, a gesture that already felt instinctive, protective. There was nothing to feel yet. No movement. No sign. Just the idea of something fragile and real, depending on me, whether I felt ready or not.
“Okay,” I whispered into the dark. “It’s you and me, then.”
The words felt strange in my mouth. Unreal. Too big for the quiet room. But I said them anyway, because someone had to say them out loud. Because this baby—this tiny cluster of cells that was going to become a person—deserved to know, even now, that someone was choosing them.
Even if that someone was just me.
Owen showed up Saturday morning like clockwork.
I heard his truck in the driveway, the engine cutting out, the familiar creak of his boots on the porch steps. By the time he let himself in through the kitchen door, I had coffee ready.
“Morning,” he said, settling into his usual chair at the kitchen table.
“Morning.”
He was wearing his off-duty clothes. Jeans worn soft at the knees, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair was still damp from a shower, and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. The same bone-deep exhaustion I saw in my own mirror every morning.
We were both running on empty. Just in different ways.
I poured myself a cup of tea and sat across from him. The kitchen was quiet except for the tick of the clock and the distant sound of Mrs. Patterson moving around upstairs. Saturday morning. The rhythm of it, the familiarity, felt like the only solid ground I had left.
“You okay?” Owen asked. Those steady eyes, watching me. Seeing too much, the way he always did.
I opened my mouth. Felt the words rising up—all of it, the pregnancy and Marcus and the Instagram announcement and the way I'd spent three days trying to reach a man who'd erased me from existence.
I'm pregnant. Marcus is engaged to someone else. I don't know what I'm going to do.
But different words came out.
“I’m glad you’re here.” I wrapped my hands around my mug. “It’s easy with you,” I said quietly. “I don’t feel like I have to be anything other than what I am.”
Something flickered across Owen's face. A shadow, there and gone.
“That’s what friends are for,” he said.
Something tightened in my chest. Not pain exactly—pressure. Like I’d set something fragile down without meaning to and was watching it tip, slow and inevitable. I hadn’t meant to ask for anything. Hadn’t meant to make it heavier.
I wrapped my hands more firmly around my mug and looked away, giving him space to step back where it was safe.
“Owen.” I hesitated. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I know, Grace.”
But something had shifted in the air between us. Some weight I hadn't meant to add, settling onto shoulders that were already carrying too much.
“How are things at the station?” I asked, steering us back to safer ground.
He let me. Told me about a call earlier in the week, a kitchen fire that turned out to be nothing, and an elderly woman who'd burned soup and panicked. His voice warmed as he talked, the tension easing out of his shoulders. This was what we did. What we'd always done. Talk about small things until the big things felt manageable.
