“They’re going to love it,” she says. “It’s going to be the ugliest crib in the world and they’re going to sleep in it every night andthey’re going to know their father built it, and that’s going to matter more than straight rails.”
“The rails are straight now.”
“One rail is straight. The others are optimistic.” She taps the crooked one. “And you promised me crooked. The night before the estate. Crooked, understood. I have witnesses.”
“The witnesses were unborn.”
“They heard you.”
I pull her in. The crib waits between us and the window, imperfect and handmade and built by hands that have always been better at taking things apart than at building. It is the best work I have ever done. It sounds absurd, set against everything else these hands have built. I mean it anyway.
The twins kick. Both of them. Two simultaneous pushes against our stacked palms, and the pushes are stronger than the last time we did this, the two of them growing at a pace that Elena measures with instruments and I measure with the bruises on the inside of my ribs. The first kick comes from the left, the daughter, Elena’s scans settled that argument weeks ago, the one whose kicks arrive with force behind them and whose strength has been growing in proportion to her opinion about everything. The second comes from the right, the son, whose kicks are quieter but deeper, the kick of someone who doesn’t need to prove anything and knows it.
They’re arguing about something. I don’t know what. Celeste says they argue about room, about position, about whose foot goes where and whose elbow belongs in which rib. I say they’re negotiating, because negotiation is what people do who are stuck in a small space with someone they’ll spend their whole lives beside, and the sooner they learn the skill the better. Two more pushes against our stacked palms, and Celeste laughs, and the laugh fills the nursery. The four of us in one small room. The whole of it, here.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
The road climbs for eleven minutes before the gravel turns to clay.
Maximus drives. He hasn’t told me where we’re going. He told me to close my eyes, which is a thing I have not done for a man since my mother used to walk me to the kitchen on Christmas morning with her hands over my face, and the fact that I’m doing it now, voluntarily, for a man whose idea of a surprise once involved a six-century-old signet ring and a bonding ceremony in the dark, means either the pregnancy has made me soft or I trust him more than I’ve ever trusted anyone alive, and both of those things are true and neither of them is the reason I closed my eyes.
I closed my eyes because he asked.
Maximus doesn’t ask. He commands, he suggests, he proposes with the careful framing of a man who learned centuries ago that the right phrasing gets better results than the right order. But he doesn’t ask, and when he does, the asking is so rare it carries a weight that has nothing to do with authority and everything to dowith the fact that this man, who has held territory and power and an entire coalition in his hands, is standing in front of me with his car keys and a look on his face I have never seen before and asking me to close my eyes.
So I closed them.
The clay road levels. The car slows. Stops. The engine cuts. Through the closed windows I can hear wind, and birds, and the particular quiet of a place that has no neighbors.
“Keep them closed,” he says. He gets out. Comes around. Opens my door. Takes my hand.
I trust his hand. I have held it through a war, a bond-trap, a cascade that nearly killed both of us, and the Tuesday-morning chaos of a compound full of children who have collectively decided that the Lord Commander’s boot closet is the ideal location for a reading fort. His hand has never once let mine go when it mattered.
He walks me forward. Gravel under my feet, then grass, then clay. The air changes. Pine. Cut wood. Something mineral and cured underneath, like concrete that’s been drying in the sun.
“Open,” he says.
I open my eyes.
The ridge runs north-south along the spine of the property, a gentle crest that looks east toward a valley of hardwoods just starting to turn. To the west, the land drops into rolling pasture, hay-colored in the afternoon light, a patchwork of green and gold that runs all the way to a tree line a mile off. Someone laid a quilt over the bones of the earth and let the wind arrange it.
The sky is enormous. That’s the first thing. Bigger than any sky I’ve seen from behind a compound wall or a city street or the shuttered windows of a building built to keep the light out. The blue goes all the way down to the ground on every side, unbroken, and the clouds are high and slow and going nowhere in particular, andthe whole visible world is made of distance and light and the utter absence of anything trying to contain it.
The second thing is the house.
It’s framed. The foundation is poured, cured, solid, and the framing rises from it in clean lines of Georgia pine, two-by-sixes and crossbeams and the skeleton of what will be walls when the walls go up, but the walls aren’t up yet, and the framing stands open on every side, the wind moving through it, the sky visible through every gap, the whole structure more suggestion than enclosure.
There is no roof. There is no door. There is no glass in the window frames and no siding on the studs and the front entrance is a timber rectangle with nothing in it but air.
I can see the floor plan through the bones. Kitchen to the left, a wide open space with a framed-out island and the stubs of plumbing rising from the slab. Living room straight ahead, the largest space, oriented east toward the valley. A hallway branching right, and down it, two bedrooms side by side, small, equal, separated by a single shared wall that I understand instantly, because twins who spent nine months hearing each other’s heartbeats will need to hear each other through the wall when the world gets too big for one room.
And at the back, through the framing, past the two small rooms, a larger one. Ours.
The whole thing sits on the ridge like a thing that grew there. No wards hum at the perimeter. No security lattice presses against my teeth. No cameras, no motion sensors, no reinforced doors with palmprint locks. Just a house on a hill with the wind going through it and a yard that runs in every direction until it becomes somebody else’s land.
“You built me a house,” I say.
