“I don’t need you to change anything,” I said. “I didn’t fall in love with you because of small things like coffee. I fell in love with you because you’re you. The way you hum when you knead dough. The way you talk to your grandmother’s portrait when you think no one’s listening. The way you run this place like it’s a living thing that needs tending.” I cupped her face in my hands. “I don’t want a different version of you. I just want you to let me in.”
Her eyes filled.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I can do that.”
I kissed her forehead. Then her nose. Then her mouth—slow and deliberate.
The baby kicked between us again. Grace laughed against my lips.
“She’s impatient,” Grace said.
“She’s her mother’s daughter.”
Grace swatted my arm, but she was grinning. “Come on. I’ll make you terrible coffee, and you can tell me about all the things you’ve been pretending to like for sixteen years.”
“It’s a long list.”
“We’ve got time.”
She took my hand and led me up the porch steps, into the house I’d loved almost as long as I’d loved her. The screen door creaked the way it always did. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon, like always.
But something was different.
This time, I wasn’t visiting. I wasn’t helping out. I wasn’t hovering on the edges of her life, waiting to be invited in.
This time, I was home.
The following Saturday morning unfolded the way Saturday mornings always had—except for everything that was different.
Grace made coffee. I sat at the kitchen table and watched her move through the space the way I’d watched her a thousand times before. But this time, when she caught me looking, she smiled instead of glancing away. This time, when she set the mug in front of me, her hand lingered on my shoulder.
“I put less sugar,” she said. “Tell me if it’s still too sweet.”
I took a sip. It was still too sweet—but closer. Progress.
“It’s good.”
“Liar.”
“It’s getting there.”
She laughed and lowered herself into the chair across from me.
“What are you going to tell Marcus?” I asked.
Grace’s smile faded slightly—not with regret, but with resolution.
“The truth,” she said. “That I’m not going to marry him. That I should have told him that years ago, before I spent so long trying to be the person he wanted me to be.” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “He’ll want to be involved with the baby. He should be. She’s his daughter. But he and I—” She shook her head. “We were over a long time ago. I was just too afraid to admit it.”
“And the B&B?”
“What about it?”
“It’s a lot,” I said. “Running this place, raising a baby. I don’t want you to—” I stopped, then started again. “I want to help. Not because I’m trying to be useful. Because this place matters to you, which means it matters to me.”
Grace reached across the table and took my hand.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m not scared anymore.”
