“You don’t look terrified.”
“I’m doing the thing.” He strokes my hair. “Where I don’t show it. Old habit. Working on it.”
Then, when I hide my face in his chest and let myself crumble, he holds me.
“We’re going to be okay,” he soothes. “I promise, this time nothing bad is going to happen. Our baby is going to be beautiful, just like you, and loved by both of us.”
He keeps saying it in different ways, and finally, I start to believe him.
“This is going to be an amazing time in our lives, sweetheart.”
I sniffle. “Okay.”
He kisses me.
In the garden, in the spring evening, under the fig tree that I planted and he kept alive, he kisses me—not urgently but with the calm confidence of a man who knows he has me—through good times and bad.
When he pulls back, he is smiling.
His phone beeps, and he grins widely as he sees whatever message has come through.
“Let’s go inside. I have something for you.”
I stand up, and he puts his arm around me, leading me in.
I gasp as I go through the open French doors and see people. My parents. Milo and Tess and their kids, the youngest one with a tooth that has grown back in since I last saw him.
Dina, who is crying.
Percy, who has a bouquet of flowers in his hand.
I stop in the doorway.
I look at Fox. “What? How?”
“I texted them while you were crying your guts out,” he tells me with great satisfaction.
“You planned this?”
“A couple of days ago, when I found the pregnancy test in the bathroom trash,” he explains smugly, but I can see the slight uncertainty, the human thing beneath his alpha thing, and it makes me love him unreasonably more.
“And, it hasn’t been easy to plan this since you didn’t want to tell anyone,” Dina quips and walks up to me. She hugs me tight. “Congratulations!”
Then my mother and father and Milo and Tess, even the kids, and lastly Percy, who hands me the flowers.
“I’m going to be the Godfather,” he announces.
This is not like the last time when we decided to get married, quietly and without pomp and show. No, this is something we are doing with the people who matter most to us here, and not because I’m pregnant.
What if I lose the baby? What if?—
“Stop it.” Fox kisses my temple. “Good things are going to happen.”
Then he looks around the room and at me. “Sweetheart, I wanted to do this with everyone who matters to you and us here.”
I smile because he’s repeating the words I just said to myself. We’re so in sync these days, it’s embracing.
He reaches into his pocket and takes out a ring—not the ring he gave me at the courthouse, not the practical, chosen-in-a-hurry ring that I wear because I must.
