“She go down okay?” I asked.
“Didn’t even make it through the second page.” He stopped at the edge of the hammock and looked down at me with that quiet, open expression that had undone me on a dock five years ago and showed absolutely no signs of stopping. “What are you reading?”
I held up the cover. He glanced at it.
“Any good?”
“I haven’t actually read any of it.”
“No?”
“The river’s too interesting.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He reached out, took the book from my hands, and set it on the grass. He glanced at thehammock and back at me, and I shifted to make room without being asked.
He settled in beside me, the hammock adjusting to his weight, and I ended up half against him the way I always did. The thing had a natural lean toward whoever was heavier, and after five years, that math hadn’t changed.
“She’s going to need her own room,” I said.
“I know.”
“The cabin only has two bedrooms.”
“I know.”
“Millie’s in one and we’re in the other and there’s a baby coming in approximately six months who’s going to need somewhere to sleep that isn’t a dresser drawer.”
“I know.”
I tipped my head back to look at him. He was staring at the river, that same private calculation he’d been doing since the first morning I watched him check the water from the dock. Already thinking. Already three steps ahead of the conversation, same as always.
“You’ve already been looking at options,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Cade.”
“There’s a piece of land upstream. Flat, good tree cover, close to the river.” He glanced down at me. “Kyron knows a builder.”
I stared at him. “How long have you been sitting on that?”
“Couple weeks.”
“We could’ve been talking about this.”
“We’re talking about it now.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again, and he watched me do it with that almost-smile. I gave up and laughed because there was nothing else to do with him. Twenty years from now, I would still be two steps behind, and I’d made my peace with that.
“Okay,” I said. “Talk to Kyron’s builder.”
“Already did.”
“Of course you did.”
His hand moved slowly across my belly as the river kept doing its thing with the light. Inside the cabin, Millie was asleep with one arm thrown over her face the way she always slept, same as her father. The afternoon settled around us, warm and unhurried and completely ours.
My parents had opinions about the house, naturally. They’d had opinions about Wildwood Valley and the medical office in Hartsville and the fact that their daughter had called them from an inn to say she wasn’t coming home and, by the way, she’d met someone. My mother had required three separate phone calls to process it, and my father had driven up to Wildwood Valley the following weekend. He’d spent two hours with Cade on the river and come back quieter and more settled than I’d expected.
