“You’d do that?” he asked.
I knew he was asking about more than travel.
“Yes,” I said. “I miss my family. My dad especially. I need him to see that I’m happy. Things are better with Elliot now, and Helena should know him too. And your mother… I think it’s time I met her properly.” Something in him softened.
I leaned into him and let my forehead rest against his shoulder. “It won’t be easy,” I said. “But I still want to go.”
His mouth brushed the top of my head.
“Washington first,” he murmured.
I smiled against him. “Washington first.”
Hayden
Washington still carried too many ghosts. But this time, I walked through it with Helena’s hand in mine and Edwina beside me, and the city felt less like a wound. We spent the day together, just living. Helena asked questions, dragged us from place to place, and fell asleep that night with Snowy tucked under her arm.
I stood by her bed for a while, watching my daughter sleep in the city where everything had once gone wrong. When I returned to the sitting room, Edwina was by the window, Washington glowing below her.
I opened the bottle of wine we had brought up and poured two glasses. When I held one out to her, she looked at it, then at me, and shook her head.
“No?”
She smiled faintly. “Not tonight.”
I had been watching her all day while pretending I was not. Edwina always pulled that out of me, some darker instinct that noticed too much where she was concerned. The small details had started gathering before I let myself understand them, the food she pushed aside, the faint tiredness around her eyes, the way her hand sometimes drifted to her stomach when she thought no one was looking, the way she had refused wine more than once with a smile too casual to be innocent.
I set the second glass down untouched. She turned from the window and came toward me. By the time she reached the couch, the air between us had already changed. No matter how much history stood between us, Edwina and I always found each other in that darker way. Our bodies had built a language out of everything our mouths had once ruined.
She sat first. I followed. For a while, neither of us spoke. Washington glowed beyond the window. Helena slept in the next room. Spring air moved faintly at the curtains. Then Edwina turned toward me, and whatever patience I had left disappeared.
I kissed her.
It was slower than that, full of the restless hunger that had followed me all day while I watched her walk through the city where I first lost my mind over her. She kissed me back with intensity, her hands at my shoulders, her warmth leaning into me until the room narrowed around us.
Even then, I noticed.
The careful tension in her body when my hand moved lower. The catch in her breath before she broke the kiss and whispered, “Be gentle.”
I went still enough to feel my own pulse. My mouth brushed hers once more, my hand still at her waist, while every part of me sharpened around a thought I did not yet trust.
I drew back and looked at her. Her lips were flushed.
“Edwina,” I said. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
For a second, she only stared at me with that tenderness that always ruined me faster than tears. Then her gaze dropped, and her hand moved to her stomach almost without thought. When she looked back at me, her eyes were softer than I had ever seen them.
“I didn’t know how to say it yet,” she whispered.
Every nerve in my body locked.
“How far?” I asked, and my voice sounded strange even to me.
She swallowed once.
“Eight weeks.”
For one suspended second, I could not move.
