Next Time Away novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Jonas's POV: Morning

Jonas's POV

I woke at five, because I have woken at five for twenty years.

For a second I did not know the ceiling.

Then I knew it, and I lay very still.

It was Tove's grandmother's ceiling, with a water stain in the corner.

I had meant to fix it three summers running, before I was told to stay off the land.

Tove slept on her side with one arm over my chest.

Her hair was across my mouth.

I did not move it.

Through the monitor on the dresser came a small, indignant sound, the one that comes before the real crying.

I slid out from under her arm without waking her.

I found my jeans in the dark, and I went down the hall to the nursery in bare feet.

Greta lay in the crib I had built, twice, with her fists up beside her ears.

She was eight weeks old and six pounds, and when she saw me she stopped.

She looked at me with her whole furious face.

"Morning," I said.

I picked her up the way the nurse had taught me in the NICU, with one hand under her head.

She smelled like milk and the cedar of the crib.

I carried her down to the kitchen and warmed a bottle on the stove.

I stood at the window and fed a child who was not mine, and watched the sun come up gray on the lake.

Not mine.

Two years of that word had worn a groove in me.

I had said it about the dock, about the truck, about my own name on the mailbox.

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