He kissed my neck, slow and deliberate. “You’re going to be a good dad.”
I snorted. “You barely trust me to build a bookshelf.”
“Because you refuse to read the instructions.”
“Instructions are for people who haven’t done it before.”
He laughed, loud and sharp. The sound bounced off the beams, echoing through the skeleton of the house.
We did one more lap, Carter refusing to let me help him down the plywood steps until the very last one, where he pretended to trip just so I’d catch him. When we reached the truck, he groaned and leaned against the door, palm pressed to the top of his belly.
“You all right?” I asked, scanning him for distress signals.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just tired. And hungry. And maybe, just maybe, slightly over this whole gestation thing.”
“Want to head back?”
He nodded, and I unlocked the passenger side, helping him up and buckling the seatbelt under his stomach. I did a quick perimeter check—habit, not need—then rounded to the driver’s side. For a minute I just sat there, letting the sensation of his laughter, his warmth, wash away the last of my nerves.
He fiddled with the radio, settling on an old country station. “You realize,” he said, “that in a couple weeks, we’re going to have a tiny person depending on us for literally everything.”
I grinned. “We’ll teach it to run power tools by three.”
He nudged me with his elbow. “You’re not supposed to let the baby chew on nails.”
“Only the stainless-steel kind,” I said, deadpan.
He rolled his eyes, but I saw the dimple at the corner of his mouth.
As we pulled away from the site, I glanced in the mirror one last time. The house stood raw and unfinished, but the light caught the beams in a way that made it look alive, like it was already holding a memory.
I didn’t say it out loud, but I felt it down to my bones: this was going to work. We were going to make it work. And, for the first time in a long, violent life, I was ready for whatever came next.
The drive back to Black Butte Ranch was a slow bleed into summer dusk, all the heat of the day trading places with shadows that stretched out forever across the fields. Carter slept most of the way, head tipped against the window, one hand bracing his stomach as if the baby was liable to bail out at the next cattle grate.
He woke up three miles from the turnoff, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, blinking at the world like it was a test pattern he hadn’t studied for.
“You hungry?” I asked, because the answer was always yes.
He yawned. “Starved. Is Jojo cooking tonight?”
“He hasn’t stopped cooking since sunrise.”
Carter patted his belly, satisfied. “There is a God.”
We crested the hill above the house and saw the porch lights already burning gold, a string of Edison bulbs looping from the eaves all the way out to the barn.
In the yard, someone had dragged out two sawhorses and dropped a new plank table across them, unfinished wood that still smelled of sap and ambition.
The table was already set, plates stacked, wildflowers jammed into a row of old whiskey bottles, candles stuck in between like they’d been growing there all along.
I pulled up, killed the engine, and watched Carter take it in.
“Surprise,” I said, though the effort was all Rawley’s. He’d recruited the rest of the misfits to build the thing, and if I knew him, he’d made a competition out of it—who could saw straightest, whose legs were plumb, whose screws lined up like parade formation.
Carter rolled down his window, breathing deep. “It’s beautiful.”
I wanted to say, Not as much as you, but even I had a limit.
