The three of them take everything into the bedroom to eat while putting together the bassinet taken from Jeff’s house that’s been waiting in storage.
He gets that familiar, warm feeling in his chest again at knowing the baby will be right here in their room, like he used to imagine.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Addison questions around a mouthful of cracker concoction. “She’ll wake you up every night for a while. We can use the spare room as a nursery.”
“Did I wake you up all the time when I was little?” Emma cuts in.
“No.” Addison smiles. “You were the best baby. Always quiet.”
He’d find that hard to believe if he didn’t know the kid. She’s a teenage chatterbox these days, but something tells him she always knew not to wake the sleeping beast they shared a house with.
“She’ll be fine right here,” Wyatt tells her. “The spare room is too far when we can’t use a monitor.”
“You can always change your mind if it’s too much.”
He opens his mouth to protest, but she holds up a hand. “It’s an option, that’s all. A screaming baby is a lot for anyone, and I won’t hold it against you if you need a break.”
Old habits die hard. In some ways, Addison has lapsed back into her old framework far more easily than he wishes she would. “Well, she’s my baby, so she can cry all she wants. I’m gonna tell her you assumed she’d scream like a banshee all night when she gets older, though.”
She fake gasps. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, I will. Speaking of her getting older, have we thought of names yet?”
“By we, you mean me?”
“Mhmm.”
“Absolutely not. I can’t think about that until she’s in my arms, alive and whole and…real.”
“Can we try out names until one feels right once she’s here?” Emma asks. “Like we have been with the new goats?”
Addison snorts. “That’s not a bad idea. No birth certificate to worry about, we can throw different names at her every day until one sticks.”
“Okay, both of you are fired again,” Wyatt sighs. “This kid is gonna have some sort of identity crisis. The goats don’t even have permanent names yet, and it’s been months.”
Addison shrugs with a wave of her hand. “Goat number eleven and goat number twelve will let us know what their names are eventually, and so will this baby.”
“Oh my god.”
He hasn’t seen her smile this much in days and hopes it’s a sign that her mood swings are over…until the worst happens.
The scene in front of him plays out in slow motion as the plate drops from her hands and food scatters across the floor. Her lips part in shock, and her eyes water in an instant.
All that amusement they gathered up vanishes as tragedy strikes.
He’s got precious little time to fix this before it spirals, so he silently gathers the cracker towers that landed upright and returns the plate to her waiting hands, backing away slowly.
“Five-second rule,” he says, as if defusing a bomb.
It was longer than five seconds, but whatever’s on the floor is a better option than Addison going hungry.
She nibbles the end of a cracker in a testing bite, and then all is right with the world again. He’s granted a smile like the whole thing is silly, and she resumes inhaling the food like it never fell at all.
Crisis averted.
Now all they need to do is name this kid before she learns to talk.
* * *
