I try to keep the smile off my face.
I do.
But sitting here watching the three of them go through what took me months to sort out around her? Let’s just say I’m glad I’m on this side of it.
I’m in the nest while I do it. Hers — the one she built me out of nearly every blanket and pillow she owns. And the throw. Can’t forget the throw.
She called it excessive.
It’s perfect.
The nest is mine. I’ll share, but I don’t really want to. Not a problem tonight — Gunnar can’t commit to sitting down.
He’s tried twice now. Knee on the edge, hand on the blankets, and then whatever a nest does to a man like Gunnar happens, and he picks himself back up like the pillows said something offensive to him. It’s the funniest shit I’ve seen him do in decades, and I once watched him argue with the weather.
I’m already grinning.
So much for that.
I have not told her I’d hold this pile of blankets through an actual war before I give it back. Gunnar and Rayner are arranged around it like it’s giving off heat, and neither one will sit in it, and neither one will leave it alone. Brock’s claimed the window and hasn’t left it.
Down the hall, her door clicks shut.
Everything stops.
Both of them go still on the same beat, chins tipping a half-degree toward the sound, and I watch a couple hundred years of discipline turn into golden retrievers. She moves around in there — a drawer, the give of the mattress, one shoe hitting the floor and then, a while later, the other. They track every inch of it, and I’d put money neither of them knows he’s doing it.
I glance over at Brock. He’s right there with them.
I know the feeling. Three years of it. I’ve just never been able to watch it from the outside before.
They’re learning her sounds right now, all of them, in real time. I already know all of them. The keys. The deadline walk. The chain going on late when an article’s going badly. The drawer that sticks. The left side of the bed. Three years across one hallway with ears like mine — there isn’t a sound in that apartment I couldn’t name in my sleep. I never had the right to learn any of it. I learned it anyway.
The only thing new tonight is the distance. No hallway. No door. We handled that.
Same sounds. Ten feet closer.
It’s not easier.
“She’s texting,” Gunnar says. Out loud. Like a man who has never once been hunted.
“Gunnar.”
“What? She is. I want to know who she’s texting.” He’s looking at her bedroom door like he’s about to barge through it, but then he drifts back to the edge of the nest. Again. He hooks a pillow off the wall, puts it back exactly where it was.
“Nice blanket fort,” he says.
He said it was a nest. He hit me with the word twice and enjoyed himself both times. Now it’s blanket fort, every time. I know why. I’m not touching it.
He’s still standing over it.
So I grab his wrist and pull.
He comes down hard, half on the pillow wall, swearing. Goes still. And then — nothing. No getting up. No complaint. He just settles in slowly, like that’s enough to make sure it doesn’t count.
“Better?”
“Shut up.”
