Chapter 24: Home

I read the letter at dawn, sitting up in the boathouse bed with a quilt around my shoulders.

Caleb slept beside me with one arm thrown over his eyes.

The envelope was soft at the corners from three years in a drawer.

Inside was a single sheet in his small square handwriting.

Lena,

You asked me to dance and I said no.

I watched your face change, and I will think about it for the rest of my life.

I am going to ask my mother to put walls between us.

It's the only way I know to keep my hands off you.

Don't hate me for it.

Hate me instead of wanting me, if you can.

I think I'll lose the argument either way.

I read it twice.

Then I folded it carefully, put it back, and lay down with my cheek on his chest.

He woke without moving.

"You read it," he said.

"You lost the argument."

"I know." His arm came down around me. "Every day since."

"Good."

In June the twins were born, eleven days early, a girl and then a boy, four minutes apart.

By the first week of July we had a nursery in my Short North apartment.

We lived at my place because it has the better light.

Caleb had decided this.

I had agreed, because I had decided it first.

On a Saturday afternoon he stood in the middle of the nursery.

He held a screwdriver in one hand and a sheet of instructions in the other.

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