After Dark (The Night Owl Trilogy #3)(76)

Panic.

I swung by the agency and visited Pam. She hugged me like I might break and I joked that it was the gentlest she’d ever been with me.

Afterward, I wandered Denver again.

I got coffee and lurked in a used bookstore. I bought a second copy of Swann’s Way.

At last, I went home.

Home-sweet-f*cking home.

I avoided the house for a while, going directly to the barn and checking on Written in Verse. She was a sweet creature. I brushed her coat and picked her hooves.

“Pretty soon I’ll be sleeping out here with you,” I said.

She rolled her eyes toward me. She’d seen a lot of me in the past two days. Hannah’s anger drove me out of the house. The stalemate between us refused to break, and I found myself seeking her out, only to confront clipped answers and quick departures. How are you? Fine. Feel like furniture shopping today? Not really. Do you want to see my garden? No.

My f*cking garden: a barren rectangular patch into which I’d churned my frustration, because planting in September is pointless. I said good night to the horse and went to the garden. I stabbed at the earth with a spade. Laughable, the idea that I could nourish anything. I was a writer, not a gardener. Not a father.

“Go easy on that dirt,” Hannah said.

I stood quickly, brandishing the spade. “Hi. Hey. Didn’t hear you coming.”

She frowned and closed the gap between us. “You got some in your hair.” She brushed a clod of dirt from my hair.

Mm, she smelled good, like clover honey. She hadn’t stood this close to me since our argument, and her nearness affected me. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to look her over the way a man can look at his fiancée’s body.

“What did you get?” She pointed.

My book lay in the grass.

“Oh.” I dropped the spade. “Swann’s Way. Different translation than I’ve got.”

“I haven’t read it.” She didn’t move away from me.

“It’s a … cycle. Series-type thing.” Oh, how the tables had turned. Me, elated to get a word out of Hannah. “It’s got the perfect first line: ‘For a long time, I went to bed early.’”

She smiled and tilted her head. “Yeah.”

“It does something to you, right? The writing is dreamlike. The narrative. It moves under you. I’d kill to write like that.”

“How was Chrissy?”

“Okay. Good. I guess it’s—” God, was I about to utter the words “It’s a boy”?—“A guy.”

“A … guy?”

“Yup.” I used my superior height to its best practical use: to look way over Hannah’s head and pretend I was cooler than this baby conversation. “Everything looks fine, healthy. I took her for ice cream. She had two cones. One for the guy, evidently.”

“Ice cream.” Hannah chuckled. “That’s a thing with you Skys, huh? I wrote about it.”

“You did?”

“Yup. Chapter eleven. It’s in your in-box. My fiancé charges off to New York City”—she didn’t hesitate, though we both knew what had happened that day—“and his saintly brother Nate takes me out for ice cream, saving me from the clutches of Aunt Ella.”

Tentatively, I ran my fingers over her curls. They hung loose and fell past her shoulders, pooling in the hood of a pale blue sweatshirt.

“Well, I can’t wait to read that. And maybe my f*cking brother should stop furtively taking you on dates.”

She giggled and I smiled.

“Come here.” She took my hand and led me to the side of the house, where a long bale of hay lay in the grass. A bright quilt hung over the bale. “Sit.”

“Okay…” I sat on the block of hay.

“How does it feel?”

“You want the truth?”

She nodded.

I patted the quilt. “Lumpy? And a … piece of hay is … poking me in the ass.”

Laughter burst out of Hannah. “Okay, get up, you dork. I guess they need more padding. But it looks cool, right?”

“For a quilted hay bale, sure.” I laughed helplessly. “What the hell, babe?”

“Don’t judge me.” She grinned and perched on the bale. “This is the seating for our wedding. I got the idea online. ‘Instead of chairs, throw brightly colored blankets and quilts over bales of hay.’ It’s gonna be quaint and … country cool.”

“Our … our wedding?”

“Yeah. Our wedding. Which we’re not waiting forever to have, because we’re getting married next month. See? I can be Matt Sky, too. I can make unilateral decisions like a dick.”

I stood there in the fading light, blinking at Hannah.

She clambered up to her feet on the hay bale, looming over me.

“That day Nate took me out for ice cream, I asked him for advice. Like, marriage advice. And he said to be honest about everything, what you feel and what happens. He said little secrets are like water, but if water gets into a rock and freezes, it can break the rock.”

I tilted my head. Thank God, Hannah had a speech, because I was speechless.

“And honesty starts with communication,” she said. “I need you to get that I am okay with us adopting the … guy. The baby.” She pounded her fist into her palm. She was beginning to unravel, blinking rapidly and sniffling. “That was never the problem, once I sat down and thought about it. The problem—” Her voice quavered pitifully.