The fire burned low and honest in front of us.
“Home,” I said.
I said it like I was testing whether it would hold my weight. Whether it would stay solid under me or give way the way things had given way before, the way belonging had given way every time I had gotten close enough to reach for it. The word sat in the warm air of the room and it did not give way.
Lila said nothing for a moment.
When I looked up at her, her eyes were wet. She did not wipe them. She held my gaze, and her jaw set in the way it set when she meant something completely.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she said.
Her voice was rough at the edges, the roughness of something said through feeling rather than around it. She said it simply, the way she said things when she had stopped managing the distance between what she meant and what she was willing to show.
The exhale that came out of me was long and slow through my nose, the kind of breath you held for longer than you knew. My fingers closed around hers, and I felt her grip tighten back, and I nodded once, a small nod, careful, the nod of a man who did not yet fully trust his voice to do what he needed it to do.
I looked at the fire.
Chapter Twelve – Lila
The blanket in my hands was already folded. I knew it was already folded because I had folded it twice, smoothing each edge flat against the previous one, squaring the corners until the white knit lay in a neat, even rectangle across my palms, and now I was folding it again, my fingers pressing down the crease for no reason I could name except that my hands needed something to do and the crib was already made and the blanket was the nearest thing to me and the morning was cold outside the curtains and there was nothing wrong and my hands would not stop.
I set it on the crib rail. Smoothed it flat. Picked it up again.
Something had woken in me in the last two days that I did not have a name for, only the evidence of it: I had reorganized the changing table three times since breakfast, had moved the wicker basket of washcloths from the left side of the shelf to the right side and back again, had spent twenty minutes the previous evening deciding the placement of a small ceramic rabbit on the shelf and then second-guessing the decision in the dark before I’d fallen asleep. The room had not been wrong. Nothing was wrong. My hands simply required the continued argument.
The curtains moved faintly in the draft from the east wall and the winter light came through them in the particular way it had all week, low and pale, the sun still at that shallow winter angle that never quite committed to illuminating anything fully but laid its best effort in long strips across the nursery floor. The painted mural caught it differently than the flat walls around it, the raised texture of the brushwork making the wildflowers stand out slightly from the plaster, the looping letters of Hopesitting in a band of morning light that moved across the wall as the clouds shifted somewhere out over the fields.
I stood with the folded blanket and looked at the wall and felt my hands tighten on the knit.
Wade appeared in the doorway.
He did not announce himself and he did not knock. He simply was there, the way Wade was simply there when something needed doing, his arms full of fresh-laundered linens, the stack of them reaching his chin, the smell of warm cotton and lavender arriving ahead of him and settling into the room like something the room had been waiting for. He moved past me to the changing table, set the stack down without a word, and began sorting. His hands were methodical and unhurried, working through the stack from top to bottom: the smallest pieces first, the newborn onesies folded into neat squares and placed to one side, then the next size, then the swaddling cloths laid flat and aligned at the edges.
Rhett came in behind him.
He was carrying a wicker basket in the crook of one arm, and it was full of small garments, pale sleepsuits and cotton gowns and tiny things I recognized as gifts and had put in the basket without examining too closely because examining them too closely had required a readiness I hadn’t been able to find. He went directly to the small wardrobe in the corner, pulled the door open, and began lifting garments from the basket one by one. He shook each one gently before he hung it, working the small sleeves free if they had folded in on themselves, smoothing the fronts flat with one hand before sliding the hanger along the rod. Then he lifted out a pale-yellow sleepsuit, the soft cotton kind with the snap closure along the legs, and he stopped. He turned it once in his hands, looking at it with his head tilted theway he tilted it when he was settling on something, and then he placed it very carefully on a hanger, adjusting the shoulders until it sat straight, and slid it to the end of the rod with the same deliberate care he had given all the others.
He had not said a word since he came in.
Cole was at the crib. He had come in while I was watching Rhett with the sleepsuit, coming in quietly enough that I only registered him when I turned and found him crouched on the floor, placing a cream-colored fur rug beside the crib. His hands smoothed it flat with steady, even strokes, the same unhurried precision he brought to fence wire and frozen ground, and when the edge sat the way he wanted it, he stood up and reached into the crib and adjusted the position of the stuffed rabbit I had set in the corner that morning. He turned it slightly, settled it so it sat upright against the rail with its ears forward.
I watched all three of them move around me.
The room filled with the layered sounds of their work: the soft thud of folded linens being stacked on the changing table, the small metallic slide of hangers along the rod in the wardrobe, the particular muted sound of the fur rug being smoothed. The smell of them was part of it too, the lavender from the laundered linens and underneath it the other things that I had learned without intending to, gunpowder, low and faintly sweet, the black orchid warmth of it from Rhett’s direction, the outdoor clean of Cole near the crib. And layered through all of it, rising from my own skin, that summer-evening floral that I had stopped noticing except in rooms where it mixed with other things and became something the room held together.
The room smelled like something was already living in it.
My first instinct was still there, the one that formed and shaped itself into words in my chest: I can manage. I have it. Itwas the voice I had been running on for ages, the one that had gotten me through invoice stacks and frozen water troughs and months of walking past this door without looking in. It shaped itself and then it sat there, unsaid, and my hands went still on the blanket.
I reached out instead.
Cole was stood up placing stuffed animals on top of her toy box. My fingers found the soft edge of one of the bears, soothing it and feeling warmth of where Coles hand had been. He stopped and looked at me. I smiled. “It’s beautiful,” I said to him, then turned to Wade and Rhett who had stopped and were watching me. “It’s all so beautiful!” A tear christened, softly running down my cheekbone.
I looked up and Cole stepped forward and rubbed his thumb along my cheekbone, capturing my tear. He smiled at me.
“We will always be here for you Lila.” I nodded, bit my lower lip, then soothed the bear again.
Cole placed his hand on my shoulder, and moved over to help Wade with Hopes clothes.
