Chapter 22: Nesting

I painted the second bedroom on Pell Street in the third week of April.

It was Maddox's old room, the one he'd claimed had a leaking window.

The window had never leaked.

I stood on a stepladder with a roller in my hand, six months pregnant, in one of his Wolves shirts.

The walls were going pale yellow.

"You're not supposed to be on that," Maddox said from the doorway.

"I'm fine."

"Prescott."

"It's a stepladder. I'm not defusing a bomb."

He took the roller out of my hand anyway and carried me down, and set me on the paint-spattered floor against the wall.

He knelt in front of me and put his palm on my stomach.

The baby kicked straight into it.

His face did the thing it always did, a quick helpless crumple, and he put his forehead against my knee.

"She likes you," I said.

"She."

"I've decided. I don't know. I want a girl."

"I want whatever you want." He sat back on his heels. "I need to say something."

"That's alarming."

"I'd like you not to throw the roller."

"That's an alarming start."

"Camp opens in eleven days."

"I know."

"I've been thinking. You have a doctor here. You have the end of the semester."

"So?"

"It's a thousand miles. You'd be eight months pregnant in a place with no one in it."

"I know that too."

"So I go first." He said it carefully. "Teddy and his sisters stay with you."

"And?"

"I fly back every other weekend. We all go together after the baby."

I looked at him.

He had said it kindly, and with real thought, and I felt my chest go cold.

"You go first," I said.

"Just for a few weeks."

"And I stay here."

"With people who love you."

"With the paint."

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