I pull back. Look at her. Her face in my hands. Her eyes wet and wide and scared and looking at me the way she looked at me the night she saidI'm scaredin my kitchen, except this time there's something else in it. Something underneath the fear.
She's waiting for me to flinch.
She is standing in my doorway waiting for me to do the math. The age gap. The friendship. The career. The exposure. All of it. She's waiting for me to calculate the cost the way I calculate everything and arrive at a number that's too high.
"Declan," she says. Careful. "Say something."
"I'm—" My voice doesn't work. I try again. "I'm happy."
She blinks.
"You're—"
"I'm happy, Billie." It comes out rough. Broken open. Not the spare, controlled Declan Maguire voice. Not the voice that gives directions and holds rooms together and says things that land because they're brief. This is the underneath one. All the way down. "I am so happy I can't—" I stop. Press my forehead to hers. Breathe. "You're pregnant."
"I'm pregnant."
"You're having my baby."
"I am apparently having your baby." A sound escapes her that's half laugh, half something else. "Oh my god. I'm having your baby. Declan. I'm having yourbaby."
"Yeah." My voice cracks. "Yeah, you are."
Her face crumples. Not the sad kind. The kind where too many feelings arrive at once and the face can't hold them all. She laughs and her eyes spill over and she grabs the front of my shirt and pulls herself against me and I hold her.
I hold her the way I hold everything that matters to me. Completely. With both hands. With the full understanding that this is not something I can control or manage or file or plan for and that I am not interested in doing any of those things. I am interested in standing in my office with my arms around her and her face against my chest and the test pressing into my back where she's gripping my shirt and feeling something I have not felt in so long that I'd stopped looking for it.
Joy. That's the word. Simple. Stupid. Insufficient. Joy.
"You're not scared?" she asks into my chest.
"No."
"You should be scared. This is terrifying. The timing is insane. My dad is going to—"
"I know. Billie." I pull back. Hold her face. Her mascara-ruined, tear-streaked, luminous face. "I have been all-in on you since before I admitted it to myself."
Her eyes on mine. Wet. Waiting.
"A man who does all of that does not flinch at a test in a bathroom." I press my thumbs against her cheekbones. Wipe the mascara. Make it worse, probably. "I'm not going anywhere. That's not a promise. That's just what's true."
She looks at me for a long moment. She's been reading people her whole life. She's very good at it.
Whatever she finds, it must be enough, because she makes a sound that breaks something in my chest. Small. Real. Thesound of a woman who has been performing fine for years and has just been given permission to stop.
She cries. Once. Properly. The kind of tears that come from somewhere deep and arrive all at once. I hold her through it and I say nothing because everything I need to say I have already said.
Her hands fisted in my shirt. Her face against my chest. The test clatters to the ground.
After a while the crying stops. She pulls back. Wipes her face with the back of her hand. Looks at me.
"I must look terrible."
"You look like the mother of my child." It comes out before I've thought about it and I watch it land on her face and I watch what it does and I am going to remember this exact second for the rest of my life. Her expression. The way something in it opens.
"Oh," she says. Quietly. "That's — yeah. That's a thing you just said."
"Yeah."
