The carriage house. It's been empty for years, right?
I stared at the screen.
Grace
What about it?
Owen
I could fix it up. Move in for a while. Close enough to help with the pregnancy.
Grace
Okay.
I set the phone down and pressed my palm against my stomach.
"Uncle Owen's going to stay close," I whispered into the dark. "He's going to help us."
The words felt right.
But something underneath them felt different.
A flutter in my chest that had nothing to do with the baby—and everything to do with the man who’d been showing up for sixteen years.
I didn’t examine it too closely.
Not yet.
CHAPTER 10
Owen
I packedmy life into boxes on a Sunday morning.
It didn’t take long. That was the thing about being thirty and single: you accumulated less than you thought. Clothes, books, and kitchen stuff I never used because I ate most of my meals at the station or at Grace’s. A few framed photos. The toolbox my grandfather had left me. My father’s old turnout coat—the one I couldn’t wear but couldn’t throw away.
The apartment had been month-to-month since Sarah left. I’d been meaning to find somewhere permanent, but permanent required decisions I wasn’t ready to make. Now the decision had made itself.
I called my landlord, gave thirty days’ notice, and loaded everything into my truck.
The carriage house was small but solid. One bedroom with dormer windows that caught the morning light. A bathroom with tile so old it had come back into style. A kitchenette with a two-burner stove and a refrigerator that hummed like it was thinking about something. Built-in bookshelves along one wall, empty and waiting.
It smelled like dust and old wood and possibility.
I unpacked the books first. Mostly technical manuals—fire science, building codes, the chemistry of combustion. A few worn paperbacks my father had given me before he died: Hemingway, McMurtry, and a Louis L’Amour western with a cracked spine. I lined them up on the shelves and tried not to think about how permanent that looked.
The uniforms went in the closet. The kitchen stuff in the cabinets. The photo of my father on the nightstand, the one I’d carried with me through every move since I was fifteen. Dad in his gear, grinning at the camera, three months before the warehouse fire that killed him. He looked young. Younger than I was now.
That first night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Through the window, I could see the light in Grace’s kitchen. She was up late, probably baking. She did that when she couldn’t sleep.
A hundred feet away. Close enough to hear if she called out. Close enough to be there in thirty seconds if something went wrong.
This is practical, I told myself. This is what friends do. She’s pregnant and alone, and I’m helping her through a hard time—the same way she sat with me after Sarah left. That’s all this is.
The lie settled heavy in my chest.
I started in the nursery without being asked.
