That meant something, didn’t it? Bloodline. Obligation. The weight everyone said I was supposed to carry.
But did blood alone make a family?
I thought about Gran, who’d raised me when my own parents couldn’t. Who’d taught me to bake and balance books and stand up straight when the world tried to push me down. She wasn’t my mother, but she was my family—the only family that had ever felt real.
I thought about Owen. Sixteen years of Saturday mornings. Sixteen years of showing up, of being there, of building something steady and true without ever asking for anything in return.
He wasn’t the father of this baby. But he’d been more present in the last seven months than Marcus had been in the last seven years.
Marcus shifted beside me and mumbled something in his sleep. His hand brushed my arm, and I flinched.
I didn’t love him anymore.
Maybe I never really did—not the way love was supposed to feel. I’d loved the idea of him, the stability he represented, the future he promised. I’d loved being chosen by someone confident and successful and sure of himself.
But I’d never felt seen by him. Not the way I felt seen by Owen.
Owen, who’d pulled away since Marcus arrived. Owen, who was probably lying awake in the carriage house right now, fifty yards away, giving me space I hadn’t asked for.
Owen, who felt like the piece that was missing. The gravity that kept me centered.
The baby kicked again, harder this time.
I pressed my hand against the movement, grounding myself in the solid reality of this child. Marcus’s child. The reason I was lying here, trying to convince myself that obligation was the same as love.
But when I closed my eyes, the hands I imagined holding this baby weren’t Marcus’s.
They were calloused and careful and belonged to a man who’d built a crib at three in the morning because he couldn’t sleep.
What did that mean?
I lay in the dark, listening to Marcus breathe, and let the question sit in my chest like something waiting to be answered.
CHAPTER 13
Owen
I couldn’t breatheat the B&B anymore.
Every time I saw Marcus touch Grace’s shoulder. Every time I heard him sayour babylike he’d been there for the last seven months. Every time I saw her laugh at something he said—a beat too late. Like she had to remind herself.
Something twisted in my chest until I thought I might break.
So I drove to Liam’s ranch.
The road out of town wound through farmland, past fields going gold with September, past the same curves and potholes I’d been driving since I got my license.
Liam was out by the fence line when I pulled up. He straightened, wiped his hands on his jeans, watched me park and walk toward him across the dry grass.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Grace?”
I didn’t answer. Liam just nodded, like that was all the confirmation he required.
“Beer’s in the cooler,” he said, nodding toward the barn. “Post-hole digger’s by the gate. We can talk or not talk. Up to you.”
